Modern telecommunications let you see and hear things across great distances -- but it does nothing for our sense of touch. Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology want to change that.

A group at the school's famed Media Lab have developed inFORM, a motorized board that can display digital information in a way that can be tangibly felt and manipulated. A computer pushes plastic pins up and down to form a 3D shape, similar to how a Pin Art toy works. A Microsoft Kinect sensor is used to detect a person's motion.