Just when you thought a box of sand was the last vestige of childhood playthings that don’t require a wall socket or battery pack, along comes the augmented reality sandbox (another video here). Looking at the notes for the project, the goal of making a real-time topography model to serve as a backdrop for graphics effects appears to have been met with amazing results.
Not only does it color and topographically mark your sand castles and moats, but a hand gesture “creates” water that flows accordingly. Given the Kinect 3D lineage of the software, I wonder why they stopped at water. Why not boulders and soapbox racers?
A few months ago I saw an art installation that consisted of a table made of stretched fabric and a sensor/projector set-up not unlike this augmented sandbox. Touching the fabric caused the light to change and also produced sounds. Neat, I thought, but what would you do with it? Sandbox did not occur to me.









