Yesterday, during the CAIF workshop, Takashi Matsumoto (KEIO University) presented Z-agon.
Each face of this cubic movie player is a high-resolution and rimless display allowing you to watch digital movie contents in any place where there’s Wi-Fi.
You can receive video mails on the cube and this newly coming message can be shown on the bottom face to avoid getting in the way of your work. Even if you put Z-agon up side down the device would recognize it and automatically corrects itself by algoritm.
You can also play games on its six-face. The game is displayed as a scrolling game, with for example, a character that moves through one display to another one. Also Z-agon has built-in video cameras to augment communication between users. You can see the face of another user while s/he is using Z-agon. Takashi also showed an amazing use of the cube with maps of the city where you could tilt the device to zoom in/out the map.
The network of Z-agon is envisioned to be peer to peer, therefore Z-agon cubes can privately communicate each other sharing its contents.
The first prototype was about 12 inches, but now it’s about 2.5 inches.
PDF presenting the project.