Ah, I love viewing Rube Goldberg machines. Not because it is fun watching creators figure out fun ways to add dozens of steps to complete a simple task, but I envy their creators. Why? It’s all that free time these people have on their hands designing, testing, resetting, and retesting their machines over and over again until they get it right.
But free time jealously aside, a research project in Norway and a design firm from London has created a machine that isn’t your ordinary Rube Goldberg machine. Instead of simple devices physically touching one another to keep the machine sequence going, this machine called the “Nearness” concept uses RFID and mobile technology to create several steps that eventually leads to turning on a computer. In this case, their machine uses devices that are activated in proximity of one another to complete the chain.
The “Nearness” machine was created in collaboration with design company Berg and a research project called Touch that explores Near Field Communication (NFC) which allows mobile phones to communicate with physical things.