Meet WOWCube: A Twisty Handheld Set To Take Gaming To A New Dimension

thegamer.com:

Picture a Rubik’s Cube made of glass. It’s about twice as heavy as a normal one, and it only has four tiles on each side instead of nine. When you twist it, the screens on each of the 24 tiles spring to life, revealing a suite of three-dimensional games and apps that are controlled with only a few simple gestures - tapping, shaking, tilting, and twisting. As intuitive as it is puzzling, the WOWcube is a curious piece of technology that its creator hopes will have far reaching applications, from gaming to productivity, to early child development and STEM.

It may sound simple, but the technology powering the WOWCube is anything but. As CubiOS’ CEO Max Filin explained to me over Zoom last week, it isn’t possible to build a device with a single, centralized CPU that can twist and turn the way WOWCube does. Instead, the cube is made up of eight individual modules, each with their own CPUs, batteries, and screens, that connect together with 144 neodymium magnetic balls, 96 of which continuously share low voltage data between the modules. This is the real mechanical marvel of the WOWcube, which Filin demonstrates by disassembling a cube in front of me.

First, he launches one of WOWCubes easier to understand games, called Playball, in which you use the cube’s internal gyro to roll a ball around until it lands in a hole. Filin then took the cube apart and reattached the magnetic modules in a random order, and miraculously, the tiny ball was able to pass back and forth across each screen. I barely understand how the technology works, but my mind was instantly blown wide open to all the possible uses for these tiny, interactive computers. Filin describes his vision for a board game that uses each module as the playing pieces, which