Researchers from Japan’s Institute of Media Arts and Sciences have developed dominoes that topple without touching. Dubbed “Esper”, the tiles feature built-in Zigbee modules for wireless communication between each other and acceleration sensors and tabs in the bottom that make the dominoes fall over.
What’s cool is that you can “program” each tile to set the order in which the dominoes topple (it’s also possible to make multiple dominoes topple at the same time).
The Esper dominoes aren’t commercially available at this point (Zigbee modules are still too expensive), but they are pretty cool.
This video (in English, uploaded by our friends at Diginfonews in Tokyo yesterday) provides more insight: