Intel’s chief technology officer Justin Rattner, during his keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, gave an insight in to the chip maker’s views of human-electronics interactions which involves swarms of tiny robotics.
It seems that creating new types of human-machine interfaces is part of Intel’s R&D plans.
“The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago,” Rattner said. “There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future.”
Rattner revealed that Intel researchers were investigating how millions of tiny micro-robots, called catoms, could build shape-shifting materials. “If used to replace the case, display and keyboard of a computing device, this technology could make it possible for a device to change physical form in order to suit the specific way you are using it.”
Rattner said this was exploratory research, but he demonstrated for the first time the results of a novel technique for fabricating tiny silicon hemispheres using photolithography, a process used today to make silicon chips.
"This capability is one of the basic structural building blocks needed to realise functional catoms, and will make it easier to bring the necessary computational and mechanical components together in one tiny package less than a millimeter across," said Rattner.