What magic can teach us about the future of technology, according to an MIT magician

 At the computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH, Marco Tempest of Magic Lab and the MIT Media Lab explained how magic tricks can test people’s psychological responses to emerging technology, like drones and robots.

In a live-streamed talk for this year’s SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference, magician Marco Tempest demonstrated a flock of drones that responded to his spoken and gestured commands, forming a ring around him and even following his orders to insert themselves into a box.

Tempest, the head of New York’s Magic Lab and a magician who frequently works with digital technology, might be an illusionist, but the drones were completely real. The illusion was in their behavior, he revealed: The drones were what does a computer engineer do to follow coded routes, guided in part by lines on a carpet below Tempest, and didn’t pay any attention to what Tempest was doing. Their seeming obedience and collaboration was just the result of each device’s individual program.

“You could say it’s the illusion of interactivity you’re experiencing when you’re watching my drones,” Tempest, who has been a director’s fellow at the MIT Media Lab and taught a course there on using magic as technology design inspiration, told the streaming audience for the talk at the Association for Computing Machinery’s well-known graphics conference. “They would do everything they do without me even being there.”