Slurp, a digital eyedropper lets you move information like water

We love stuff about human computer interaction here on ShinyShiny and this little dropper device is a gorgeous idea for computer control. Called Slurp it works rather like a squishy stylus, making tasks into a tactile experience and treating information as if it were water. Suck up a file from one folder and squirt it out on another, or on another computer. This beats Bluetooth for simplicity.

And Slurp it doesn’t just work on computer screens, it works on the world too, letting you suck up information from objects around you.

Though it was launched as an MIT project a few years ago, it’s an interesting kind of tool for the internet of things, something we’re getting a bit more interested in as process of making chip-enabled devices speeds up. (See our story on Qualcomm jumpstarting the Internet of Things last week.)

Maker Jonathan Zigelbaum at MIT calls it “a digital eyedropper for manipulating abstract, digital material”. The videos probably explain the device best of all.

[Slurp site on MIT here, via Pasta & Vinegar]