Maker: PROTO
Photography by Jenny Pfeiffer
Where the Bits Meet the Flesh
IBM’s Thomas Zimmerman and the “thrill of the make.”
By David Pescovitz
Call the fire marshall: Underneath this stuff, there’s a desk belonging to IBM scientist Thomas Zimmerman.
When I extend my hand to greet IBM research scientist Thomas Zimmerman, I half-expect a shock to accompany the shake. Ten years ago, Zimmerman and MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld demonstrated a system where electronic business cards could be swapped just by shaking hands. Dubbed a “personal area network” (PAN), the system was just one in a long line of novel human-computer interfaces Zimmerman ...
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