MIT Lab To Release Self Assembling Phone, Gadget Without The Need For Human Interference

MIT's self-assembly lab steps up their game to a whole new level. They are currently creating a phone that assembles by itself. Is 3D and 4D printing responsible for this vast creation? Is this a rise to the technology era? Competitors must be aware that the next big thing is coming.

Skylar Tibbits, a research scientist from MIT department of architecture, first established in 2011 MIT's "Self-Assembly Lab." Originally, the lab's purpose is to create materials that can sprout and change by its own, set-up by 4D printers and will be utilized through 3D printing. Since then, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA has funded MIT's lab to work on self-constructing materials including flat-packed furniture, according to Tech Times.com.

As follows, MIT's self-assembly lab came up with a project that allows a mobile phone to assemble on its own without human interference. For this to happen, energy source and reciprocal action are needed. With the help of lock-and-key mechanisms, experts invented a tumbler that rattles the pieces together to assemble the mobile phone. 

The process by which is quite simple: The prototype is composed of six parts, throw them all in the tumbler and the magnetic lock-and-key system will automatically find each other as the tumbler rattles them all together. This six-part material can create two mobile phones.

Skylar stated, according to ZD Net.com, "If you look at how things are manufactured at every other scale other than the human scale, look at DNA and cells and proteins, then look at the planetary scale-everything is built through self -assembly, but at the human scale, it's the opposite. Everything is built top down. We take components and we force them together."

It is not yet certain if MIT will mass produce this, they are still undergoing improvements and further research. Tibbits added as Fast Code Sign reported, "Right now the phone is predetermined, and we're using this process to assemble that phone. But imagine you take a circuit board and you have different logical building blocks and those logical building blocks can be tumbled around you can have different functionalities."