AudioPint

The AudioPint vision is to build a portable, durable, and inexpensive sound synthesis and effects system that is based completely on free open-source software, is flexibly reconfigurable and easy to use, and that is capable of accepting a diverse range of input devices for control purposes. AudioPint supports expressivity and experimentation with new forms of sound control.We expect tomorrow's musicians to be using tomorrow's instruments, and to an increasing extent, these instruments can be tools of their own design.

Augmented Mirror

The goal of this project is to provide an intuitive interface to give users insight into their daily activity patterns. Using a display embedded in a mirror, data from wearable sensors can be visualized into a familiar routine context. We put an emphasis on how to display such data in a subtle way so that it is non-intrusive and maintains the mirror's original purpose.

We are investigating several applications of the technology, including communication with mobile phones to collect behaviour data, face recognition to identify members of a family as well as clothing store application instant messaging application. .

Blossom

Blossom is a multiperson awareness system that uses ioMaterials-based techniques to connect distant friends and family. It provides an awareness medium that does not rely on the attention- and reciprocity-demanding interfaces that are provided by digital communication media such as mobile phones, SMS and email. Combining touch-based input with visual, haptic, and motile feedback, Blossoms are created as pairs that can communicate over the network, echoing the conditions of each other and forming an implicit, always-there link that physically express awareness, while retaining the instantaneous capabilities that define digital communication.

CASY: Contextual Asynchronous System

In recent decades families have become more geographically distributed, making it challenging for family members to maintain a feeling of intimacy. Distributed families face many challenges trying to maintain a sense of intimacy: Different time zones, limited conversation topics, and limited knowledge of the other’s availability and mindset, to name a few. Distributed family members tend to share information, practical issues (when and where to meet next time), as well as special occasions (e.g. birthday events or job promotion) and less emotional information. The result is a more fragmented relationship, which gradually leads to less intimacy. Modern communication technologies (phone, cell phone, email, instant messaging) improve communication, but in most cases, do not achieve the same level of intimacy and connectedness as in face-to-face communication.

CASY: Contextual Asynchronous System is a new communication technology integrating audio/video messaging, asynchronous communication, and context-based delivery. CASY is designed to enhance connectedness between children and their distributed family members such as grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts.

CASY enables family members to send ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ asynchronous video snippets into a shared family database. The recipient views the snippet in-context of going to sleep or waking up.

Chameleon Guitar

Can traditional values be embedded into a digital object?

In this research we implement a special guitar that combines physical acoustic properties with virtual capabilities. A wooden resonator - a unique, replaceable piece of wood that gives the guitar a unique acoustic sound, will embody the acoustical values. The acoustic signal created by this wooden heart will be digitally processed in a virtual sound box in order to create flexible sound design.

Credits:

Nan-Wei Gong (help in electronics), Melodie Kao (help in fabrication), Jasmine Florentine (help in concept design)

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Nick Barber's video on the project (IDG News Service):

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Today’s tools and instruments, whether musical or graphical, fall into two very distinct classes, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Traditional physical instruments offer a richness and uniqueness of qualities that result from the unique properties of the physical materials used to make them. The hand crafted, construction qualities are also very important for those tools. In contrast electronic and computer based instruments lack this richness and uniqueness; they produce very predictable and generic results, but offer the advantage of flexibility: they can be many instruments in one. We propose a new approach to designing and building instruments, which attempts to combine the best of both. The approach is characterized by a sampling of the instrument's physical matter and its properties and complemented by a physically simulated, virtual shape. This approach to building digital objects maintains some of the rich qualities and variation found in real instruments (the result of natural materials combined with craft) with the flexibility and open-endedness of digital ones.

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Paula Aguilera's video on the project, early stage (LabCAST, Media Lab):

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Press:

David Chandler, MIT News Office, February 3, 2009

Nick Barber, IDG News Service, New York Times, February 11, 2009

Matt Hickey, Crave, Cnet News, February 4, 2009

Tom Simonite, Short Sharp Science, February 4, 2009

Eliot Van Buskirk, WIRED, February 6, 2009

R. Colin Johnson, EE Times, February 10, 2009 .

Cherry Blossoms

Cherry Blossoms addresses the disparity between human suffering and the perception of that suffering. The project starts in a backpack outfitted with a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, with their relative location superimposed on a map of Boston. If a wearer walks into a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates an air cloud of confetti. Looking like a mixture between smoke, shrapnel and the white blossoms of a cherry tree, the explosion completely engulfs the wearer. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death. With Cherry Blossoms human loss resonates beyond the boundary of conflict.

Collective Memory/Collective Intelligence

We are developing interfaces that allow people to benefit from the knowledge and experience of others at the moment when that knowledge is most relevant. Using a variety of sensing and perception technologies, combined with common sense reasoning, these systems try to predict what a person is interested in or trying to do and bring up relevant knowledge and memories proactively.

Compact Contract: Commitments Made Easier

We all make promises to ourselves: lose 10 pounds, save more, exercise more. And yet, it is far too easy to make such promises and then find a thousand excuses to break them. Drawing on the fact that we are much less likely to make a social promise and then break it, Compact Contract is a tool for making small "contracts" with our friends and family, with a built-in reminder of the time period within which we have promised to act.

Connectus

Lifestream aggregation and clustering is used as interest extraction, which in turn is combined to generate ambient maps of connectivity projected on the ceiling of a social space. This work provides a compass for social navigation, giving subtle hints of related topics and connectivity to the entire space as you navigate your normal conversations within a room.

Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy

Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients.

Cornucopia's cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user's favorite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate combinations of food. While the deposition takes place, the food is heated or cooled by Cornucopia's chamber or the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head. This fabrication process not only allows for the creation of flavors and textures that would be completely unimaginable through other cooking techniques, but it also allows the user to have ultimate control over the origin, quality, nutritional value and taste of every meal.

Defuse

Defuse is a new method for navigating and participating in online discussions. Previous designs for online discussion were successful under the assumption that participation would be limited to tens or at most hundreds of participants. Emergent social conventions have been able to smooth over media as they scale, but ultimately they are limited by the design of a medium itself. Defuse seeks to continue scaling online discussions by adding social, structural, and historical context throughout the interface, and by widening the expressivity of a message to match the user's intention. It does so using a combination of natural language processing, machine learning, visualization, data portraiture, social network analysis, and medium design.

Visit Defuse at http://defuse.media.mit.edu.

Done: Reflective Personal Project Management

Project management is often an art. But in an objective way, it is also about memory. We often know exactly how to get our work done, and in a single sitting we can map out the process and steps. However, and time goes on, we often lost track of this, and thus retrace and reinvent what we had already decided. "Done" is a chat-based ReflectOn for allowing a person to reflect on this initial process and map their instantaneous actions to their long terms goals. By connecting these domains of though, "Done" helps the user get more done, while gaining a deeper insight into the process inherent to their work.

Embodied Emergence

Embodied Emergence explores how simple localized interactions between elements of a system can sometime result in unexpected complex patterns.

The work consists of a set of small tangible nodes that alter their behavior according to the nearby nodes, in an asynchronous fashion. Nodes have magnets on the bottom and are deployed on a flat metallic surface. Each node is equipped with a small speaker that generates a musical tone according to the state of its immediate neighbors and a simple set of rules. Nodes also provide visual feedback on their current state by means of colored lighting. Finally, the nodes sense touch through a thin metal rim and can toggle their state to reflect the interventions of viewers.

The nodes are fully independent from one another. Users can reconfigure the topology of the system in real-time by moving the nodes around and rearranging them, creating an ever-changing sound texture with unique qualities, revealed through the use of a large number of sound sources physically distributed in space.

My intent with this project is twofold. On one hand, I wish to explore how we can leverage emergent phenomenons to design more engaging audio/visual experiences. On the other, I hope that the direct manipulation of the nodes will help viewers get a better understanding and appreciation of emerging patterns within distributed systems.

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Engaze

Since time immemorial, we have judged the character of people using their external characteristics: their clothing, hairstyle, makeup, accent, and so on. With the advent of digital technology, an increasingly detailed image of our identities is now available online. In short, today we represent ourselves both physically and digitally in the world. As yes, these worlds are fairly disjointed, and our representations are likewise disconnected from each other. Just as we choose to dress more or less formally in the real world, we choose to present ourselves online through our metadata in various ways, depending on the perceived audience. However, as technology continues its inexorable progress, these two worlds are collapsing towards convergence. With Engaze, we are attempting to engage the problem of bringing together these two currently disparate representations of a person into convergence in the physical world, and to explore some of the consequences resulting from the encroachment of our virtual representations into the physical world.

Face Zoom

Face Zoom is an interface for exploring zoomable data sets by moving your body. Located the position of the face and scales a set of image and to both become larger and reveal additional information as we get closer. Mimics the natural behavior we have with the world, but provides us the flexibility of representing digital information at any scale transition.

Flexible Urban Displays

This project explores how programmable surfaces can be shaped and textured in more flexible ways than traditional LED displays. By using modular tiles as building blocks, displays can become an integral part of objects, structures and spaces.

Hero Reports

September 11th showed us we're vulnerable. We are not immune to terrorism; we are part of the battleground. But its horror also showed us our strength. That a city scared to death can be courageous. We all can be heroes. To keep us safe, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority told us to look for signs of danger, and report them. We think we should also look for signs of courage. We call them hero reports. http://heroreports.org/.

Hole in the wall

Influence

Influence is an interactive artwork visualizing how collective behavior emerges from decentralized interaction in a small social network. Individual people are affected by the behavior of people around them, and as a result, they influence the people around them as well.

We are all unique individuals. There are no two people alike. Nevertheless, other people around us affect our behaviors, thoughts and emotions in the most simple and unconscious ways. This interactive video piece presents 16 people as black and white “moving portraits”. Each portrait has a set of gestures, such as looking to the right, looking to the left, yawning, falling a sleep etc.

Each portrait has a predefined threshold level for “catching the yawn virus” from a neighbor portrait. The viewer interacts with the portraits by selecting the first portrait that will yawn. The first yawn starts a unique chain reaction of yawning, based on the predefined threshold levels and some randomness. A cycle ends when the “yawn virus” has finished spreading. Portraits that yawned “fall asleep”. A cycle might end with some portraits unaffected just as people resist influence in real life. At each cycle, the yawn spreads among the portraits at different patterns and rates.

Initimate Interfaces for Mobile Human-Computer Interaction

Mobile devices are generally used in public, where the user is surrounded by others not involved in the interaction. These devices often cause unnecessary disruption and distraction both for co-located people and the users themselves. Nevertheless, mobile devices do fulfill an important function, informing of important events and urgent communications, so they can't always be turned off in social settings. Interaction with mobile and wearable devices needs to be subtle, discreet, and unobtrusive; “intimate interfaces” are discreet interfaces that allow interaction with mobile devices through subtle gestures and peripheral cues in order to minimize disruption and gain social acceptance. Two novel examples of subtle intimate interfaces are available: an electromyogram (EMG) based, wearable input/output device that recognizes subtle, motionless gestures and provides haptic output; and a wearable peripheral display embedded in eyeglasses that delivers subtle, discreet, and unobtrusive visual cues.

inktuitive

Despite the advances and advantages of computer-aided design tools, the traditional pencil and paper continue to exist as the most important tools in the early stages of design. The goal of the project ‘inktuitive’ is to combine the intuitive process of creation that is inherent in paper and pencil with the power of computing that the digital design tools provide. Inktuitive also extends the natural work-practice of using physical paper by giving the pen the ability to control the design in physical three-dimensional space, freeing it from its tie to the paper. The intuition of pen and paper are still present, but lines are be captured and translated into shapes in the digital world. The physical paper is augmented with overlaid digital strokes. Furthermore, the platform provides a novel interaction mechanism for drawing and designing using above the surface pen movements. ‘inktuitive’ is an intuitive physical design workspace that aims to bridge the gap and bring together the conventional design tools such as paper and pencil with the power and convenience of the digital tools for design. .

Intimate Communication Armband

A small wireless device embedded in an armband allows to interact with mobile devices in a subtle and unobtrusive way. The armband is meant to be worn under clothes and it detects discreet "motionless gestures", such as a short contractions of the upper arm. These gestures can be used to activate functions of a mobile phone or PDA, such as sending a pre-defined message or rejecting an incoming call. The armband provides haptic feedback through an embedded actuator. The device is, therefore, a self-contained input/output unit. Bluetooth wireless connectivity allows interfacing with standard mobile devices. The motionless gesture recognition is based on the electromyogram (EMG): an electrical signal generated by muscular activity. EMG is used to recognize activity related to very subtle or no movement at all (isometric activity). If a gesture is recognised the device transmits via Bluetooth an appropriate message containing the device ID and the parameters describing the gesture (if any). The armband is designed to potentially fit any user; it does not require calibration or training to the muscles of individual people. The EMG controller does not occupy the users' hands, and does not require them to operate it; hence it is "hands free.".

Invisible Media

With Invisible Media we can augment objects around us to make them sensitive to, and able to inform, the focus of our attention in order to provide relevant content. The system is built to minimize bulky wearable gear, and allows the user to navigate this situated information with speech commands, keeping their hands available for manual manipulation of the objects themselves. Information is presented to people auditorily, resulting in a user-system dialog that attempts to mimic a domain expert or recommender who knows what objects are in view of the user and can suggest relevant content. We have created Engine-Info, a training application that teaches the components of an internal combustion engine, as well as a personalized shopping scenario that can suggest appropriate foods in a supermarket based on a person's preferences and health needs.

click the video to play

ioMaterials

ioMaterials is an umbrella project encompassing a variety of collocated sensing-actuation platforms looking at various aspects of dense sensing for humane communication, memory, and remote awareness. Using dense collocated sensing actuation and sensing, we can change common objects into an interface capable of hiding unobtrusively in plain sight. Relational Pillow and TextureWall are instantiations of this ideal.

JotWatch: Instant Personal Note-Taking

JotWatch is a device designed with the singular purpose of easing quick note taking on the go. As our days fill with the deluge of microtasks and information fragments that modern life entails, every one of us has had occasions when we wanted to take a quick note, or remember something, or jot down a moment of inspiration. Yet, the task of digitally recording this thought faces enough steps, waits, and changes of context scatter fleeting thoughts and discourage note-taking. The JotWatch is a simple device in a wristwatch form factor that attacks this problem with always-on, fast note-taking ability along with navigation features that allow users to make the most of limited physical real estate.

Life in a Comic

Can static paint be programmable? Can a watercolor comic change? We explore these options by using thermochromic ink and through the design of watercolor and paper paint that visually change and tell a story (adding time domain to comics frames). Using nichrome wire and a controller we adjust the temperature of the paper, and by this we control the time a new information appearers.

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MemTable

MemTable proposes designing a table with a contextual memory. The goal of the system is to facilitate reflection on the long term collaborative work practices of a small group by designing an interface that supports meeting annotation, process documentation, and visualization of group work patterns. The proposed project will introduce a tabletop designed to remember how it is used an provide an interface for contextual retrieval of information. MemTable examines how an interface that embodies the history of its use can be incorporated into our daily work lives.

Midas: Touched-based Personalization

Midas is a touch-based personalization system in development. It is designed to interact with ubiquitous ioMaterials interfaces in the objects and environment surrounding us in order to achieve seamless access to information via owner-less displays and surfaces that modify themselves to the needs to the users on the fly and on contact.

Moving Portrait

The moving portrait is based on a set of black and white portraits, comprising a rich library of photographic sequences. The portrait resides in a picture frame and interacts with its viewers using a variety of sensing techniques (vision, ultrasonic, RFID etc.). The sensing architecture enables the portrait to be aware of viewers’ presence, identity, distance, speed, and body movements. The cognitive architecture controls the portrait’s reaction, taking into account the viewer’s behavior, the portrait’s mood, as well as memory of previous interactions. All of which contributes to a complex, believable behavior.

A portrait is an inseparable part of our emotional life, but it is also a part of our environment. It represents a part of our life and a reflection of our feelings, however it is completely oblivious to the events that occur around it or to the people who view it.

By adding interaction, dynamics, and memory to a familiar portrait we create a different and more engaging relationship between the viewer and the portrait. The viewer gets to know more about the subject and in addition the portrait’s responses are adapted to the viewer’s behavior and to prior interactions with current and former viewers. Just like in real life, where every person reveals a different side of his/her personality to different people and situations, the evocative portrait reveals different sides of its own personality.

Object Awareness

The goal of this project is to allow a user with a bluetooth enabled cellphone or pda to gather personally relevant information about and interact with inanimate objects such as books, tabletops, works of art, etc in the user's vicinity.The system allows the user to passively gather information about their environment and get just-in-time reminders or suggestions from useful objects in the environment. For example, walking into a room full of augmented books, the books of interest to the user would "blink" their LEDs, thereby making it easier for the user to find books of potential interest.

Personas

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Playful Spaces

We are developing immersive environments that allow a person to interact with a system or simulation in a natural way using their whole body and natural gestures. Some of these interactive experiences are educational in nature; for example, immersive simulations that allow children to explore concepts from mathematics or physics in a playful and natural way. Other immersive environments support a community or workgroup; for example, spaces that convey dynamic information about the whereabouts, actions and interests of a community of people. Finally other spaces are designed to provide an evocative experience; for example, an immersive environment that allows a person to experience a first-person point-of-view, interactive narrative.

Portrait of Cati II

Portrait of Cati 2 is an homage to the project "Portrait of Cati" done by Stefan Agamanolis. This portrait reacts differently to a man or a woman. While reacting to a woman in a more natural way, Cati's image is more of woman's icon as a reaction to a man.

Pulp-Based Computing

Pulp-Based Computing is a series of explorations that combine smart materials, papermaking and printing. By integrating electrically active inks and fibers during the papermaking process, it is possible create sensors and actuators that behave, look, and feel like paper. These composite materials, not only leverage the physical and tactile qualities of paper, but can also convey digital information, spawning new and unexpected application domains in ubiquitous and pervasive computing at extremely affordable costs.

PureJoy

PureJoy is a flexible vocal expression interface. Think of it as an audio sketchpad for prototyping harmonies, beatboxing, and other short impromptu compositions. PureJoy uses a game joystick as a physical interface to capture and manipulate vocal sounds and other "found" sound, making it a great tool for improvised musique concrète. The use of vocal sound as primary source material takes advantage our most expressive and automatic soundmaking capability, but enables a performer to amplify the number of voices they can produce, enhance the complexity of their rythms, and change the timbre of their sound. Additionally, the joystick is a familiar, playful interface that is commonly used as a manipulator for digital information.

Q&A@T

A common feature of a modern society with all sorts of information technological developments is, we are more connected than never before. We can easily privatize public spaces using our cellphone, iPod, and all kinds of personal mobile technologies. We can easily connect to people who share the same interests or political views. We can be anywhere because we have all sorts of technologies that transport us virtually and immediately.

But we are also more detached and alienated like never before. We are being transported to places and connected to different people all the time. We live in Boston, but whether it is Boston or not, doesn't really matter anymore. Places become meaningless. We do not spend time learning about the city and its people anymore.

This project is an experiment on how we can change that through introducing a commmunication channel to the public. We understand people are already bombarded with information, so the channel has to be reall lightweight, in terms of the cost of time and effort of participating.

We focus on the Boston subway system: T, in this thesis. It is not uncommon to realize how a subway system connects people living in different parts of a city. We would like to take advantage of the fact that T gathers people of different cultures, occupations, and ages, and turn the experience of waiting for a T and riding on a T train into a time of appreciation the reality and complexity of the city. We would like to provide the people a way to express and be informed with local volatile issues, matters of minor importance, observations made on site, collected view, voices and moods of the people around us.

Quickies: Intelligent Sticky Notes

The goal of 'Quickies' is to bring one of the most useful inventions of the 20th century into the digital age: the ubiquitous sticky notes. 'Quickies' enriches the experience of using sticky notes by linking hand-written sticky-notes to the mobile phones, digital calendars, task-lists, e-mail and instant messaging clients. By augmenting the familiar and ubiquitous physical sticky-note, 'Quickies' leverages existing patterns of behavior, merging paper-based sticky-note usage with the user's informational experience. The project explores how the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), RFID, and ink recognition technologies can make it possible to create intelligent sticky notes that can be searched, located, can send reminders and messages, and more broadly, can act as an I/O interface to the digital information world.

For more information, please visit the Quickies project website.

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ReachMedia

ReachMedia is a system that supports on-the-move interaction with every day objects. The system is built around a wireless wristband with an RFID reader and accelerometers. The wristband detects physical objects that the user is interacting with, and retrieves relevant and personalized information via a smart phone. The user can then have a hands and eyes free interaction with the application by using a unique combination of slight gestural input and audio output.

reAcoustic eGuitar

reAcoustic eGuitar enables guitar players to customize their own sound by assembling different sound cells instead of a single large sound box.

each string will have it’s own bridge, each bridge will be connected to a different cell. changing the cell size, material or structure will allow sound design innovations, re-designing acoustic musical instrument according to the abilities and characteristics of rapid prototype materials. open source and shared files environment can lead to a reality in which a player can download or design his own sound cells and add them (as a patch) to his instrument.

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Does the 3D printed chamber creates any sound?

Press:

Sean Fallon, Gizmodo, January 17, 2008

Andrew Dobrow, Gearfuse, January 16, 2008

The tech Bros, January 16th, 2008

SolidSmack, October 31, 2008

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reBOOK

In a digital, immersive world, e-book readers and flat displays are taking over what was once the realm of books. The reBook project attempts to revitalize traditional book production by adding a digital interface fabrication step to the conventional print and bind process. A reBook is a fusion of a 'real book' and an e-book; the cover is embedded with a memory module, wireless microprocessor, paper-based keypad, and flexible display. The reBook's coupling of digital content within a familiar design allows for reinterpretation of classic book functionality. We are exploring how new interactions such as search, bookmarking, physical copy and paste, and annotations could emerge with such a product.

ReflectOns: Mental Prostheses for Self-Reflection

ReflectOns are objects that help people think about their actions and change their behavior based on subtle, ambient nudges delivered at the moment of action. Certain tasks such as figuring out number of calories consumed, or amount spent eating out, are generally far more difficult for the human mind to grapple with. By using in-place sensing combined with gentle feedback and understanding of an individual's goals, we can recognize behaviors and trends and provide a reflection of their own actions that is tailored to enable better understanding of repercussion of actions, and change their behaviors to better match their own goals.

Relational Pillow

With the Relational Pillow project, we are trying to provide a simple, intimate, and personable communication medium between loved ones. The pillows are capable of sensing touch information, and displaying incoming touch data as a pattern of lights that show the outline "drawn" upon the remote pillow. Pillows can connect to each other over the network so that this sense of touch can be shared across long distances. The physical sensation of holding a pillow and interacting with it builds upon the idea of using the natural features of the object in order to achieve a deeper connection between the users, without interfering in the communication process itself.

Shutters

Shutters is a soft kinetic membrane for environmental control and communication. It is composed of actuated louvers (or shutters) that can be individually addressed for precise control of ventilation, daylight incidence and information display. By combining smart materials, textiles and computation, Shutters builds upon other façade systems to create living environments and work spaces that are more energy efficient, while being aesthetically pleasing and considerate of its inhabitants’ activities.

Siftables

Imagine overturning a container of nuts and bolts, then looking through the resulting pile for a particular item. Or spreading photographs out on a tabletop and then sorting them into piles. During these activities we interact with large numbers of small objects at the same time, using all of our fingers and both hands together. These tasks take advantage of our existing skills, and we can effortlessly sift and sort - focusing on our higher level goals rather than the items themselves.

Siftables aims to enable people to interact with information and media in a physical, natural manner that approaches interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives. As an interaction platform, Siftables applies technology and methodology from wireless sensor networks to tangible user interfaces. Siftables are independent, compact devices with sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities. They can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. Siftables can be used to implement any number of gestural interaction languages and HCI applications.

The Siftables interaction platform is a collaboration with Jeevan Kalanithi. .

SixthSense

SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant like wearable device, SixthSense sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects we are interacting with. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and physical objects around us, and lets us interact with the projected information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or our interaction with the object itself. SixthSense attempts to free information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.

For more information, please visit the SixthSense project website.

Soft Mechanics

Soft Mechanics is a research effort directed towards the design of programmable surfaces and structures which use the physical properties of materials to generate actuation.

It combines smart materials and materials with different memory and elasticity states to generate kinesis by digitally controlling their physical transformations.

This design approach can support the development of physical interfaces that can change shape to accommodate different uses and contexts, while seamlessly integrating into our environments.

SOMOS: Social Mobile User Interface

SOMOS UI is short for Social Mobile UI - fresh concept for a touch-enabled, social mobile contact book application. The contact book is the heart of every mobile phone. For the past 15 years, since mobile phones were introduced, consumers were engraved by a tabular concept as the UI for their contact data. Some reasons for that are speed, efficiency and the relatively simple learning curve this interface provides. SOMOS UI attempts to change this paradigm using a social graph to display contacts. The graph nodes represent contacts. The node size reflects the frequency of communication with that contact. The links in and out of a node are automatically created and hint on the social structure of the entire contact book. It is easy to imagine how clusters that represent ‘family’ or ‘work’ will emerge.

The Touch and Haptic capability of the screen allow easy navigation and search. Touch gestures allow to zoom and scroll. A single tap will open the contact details, while a double tap will make a call. Social actions are natively supported: drag contact on another to create a link between them or send them a mutual introduction. Use your finger to draw a circle and now tap on the circle overlay to send a message to all the contacts within it.

Soundforms

Soundforms is a tabletop interface for collaborative composition. The shapes and size of objects are used as simple icons for controlling sound output, affording a playful interface for people to experiment together in a short sound composition. .

SpaceMarks

We have seen an explosion of data, but the tools necessary to understand it have not kept pace. Humans have innate spatial memory and spatial organization abilities, but our interfaces into this ever-growing world of data rarely take into account a learned behavior of space. SpaceMarks changes that, creating an intuitive and consistent method to organize, learn, and collaborate with spatially aware resources. It provides a much-needed method for offloading the processing of our information into the world around us.

SpendTrend: Reflecting on Spending Habits

SpendTrend is a ReflectOn designed to allow its user to reflect on spending habits. Often we spend based on the momentary buying capability, without considering the long-term outcomes. Most would not think twice about a Starbucks latte, but over a year this amount becomes non-trivial. Likewise, we often fail to think about savings in the long term. By making trends visible at the moment of purchase, SpendTrend attempts to make users mindful of their behavior and long-term goals. SpendTrend is built into a credit card, and has embedded processing and communication. The SpendTrend reader informs the card of the details of the purchases. With accurate, fine-grained information about purchases, the card then computes and display feedback, while also acting as a collection device for receipt data. The card harvests power directly from the reader, and has no explicit charging needs.

Spotlight

Spotlight is an installation of 16 interactive portraits. Each portrait has a set of 9 "temporal gestures" - photographic-quality sequences of human gestures such as "looking up". The portraits are networked, and placed in a 4X4 layout.

Every few seconds, a randomly selected portrait is looking towards a neighboring portrait. In turn, the neighboring portrait will look back. To a viewer of the installation, these "random discussions" create a sense of "social dynamics". The viewer can interrupt the group dynamics at any time, by selecting one of the 16 portraits. The remaining 15 portraits automatically react and direct their attention to the viewer-selected portrait, which reacts with a special gesture - "being the center of attention".

Spotlight is about an artist's ability to create a new meaning using the combination of interactive portraits and diptych or polyptych layouts. The mere placement of two or more portraits near each other is a known technique to create a new meaning in the viewer's mind. Spotlight takes this concept into the interactive domain, creating interactive portraits that are aware of each other's state and gesture. So not only the visual layout, but also the interaction with others creates a new meaning for the viewer. Using a combination of interaction techniques, Spotlight engages the viewer at two levels. At the group level, the viewer influences the portraits "social dynamics". At the individual level, a portrait's "temporal gestures" expose much about the subject's personality.

Sprout I/O

Sprout I/O is a kinetic fur that can capture, mediate, and replay the physical impressions we leave in our environment. It combines embedded electronic actuators with a texturally rich substrate that is soft, fuzzy, and pliable to create a dynamic structure where every fur strand can sense physical touch and be individually moved. By developing a composite material that collocates kinetic I/O, while preserving the expectations that we normally have from interacting with physical things, we can more seamlessly embed and harness the power of computation in our surrounding environments to create more meaningful interfaces for our personal and social activities.

subTextile

subTextile is a toolkit for behavioral textiles: the intersection of on-body computation and electronic textiles focusing on the interactive capability of electronic textiles. It provides a powerful visual programming language and hardware platform specifically designed to create complete behavioral textile systems. Using a rich, goal-oriented interface, subTextile makes it possible for technical novices to explore electronic textiles, while providing open-ended expandability to experts. As e-textiles mature, better tools and techniques are needed by artists and designers experimenting with these new materials. The subTextile project was created to support cross-pollination between technical and design disciplines in the hopes of fostering greater creativity and depth within the field.

Surflex

Surflex is a programmable surface for the design and visualization of physical objects and spaces. It combines the different memory and elasticity states of its materials to deform and gain new shapes, providing a novel alternative for 3D fabrication and the design of physically adaptable interfaces.

tagNet

It is already a common practice to document every aspect of life with digital media format such as images and video clips. tagNet is an experiment on how in the future we will be sharing and browsing those personal memories, and how the public will be able to explore the huge media space.

We challenge the existing ways of organizing media contents by directories, lists, and hierarchies. We see contents on one flat surface, and each of it is tagged with keywords that the owner believes best describe the content. Those keywords are then merged together to form a huge network where each word is a node and a link between two nodes represents their semantic relationship, defined by millions of people who use the service.

tagNet is such a network we built using tags from a commercial online album service called flickr.com. It is a semantic network that both the vocabulary and how much words relate to each other are defined collectively by all the users on flickr. We built two applications using tagNet: (1)don't search, explore and (2) contextual browsing.

(1)"don't search, explore" is an application designed for graphic designers or people who would like to explore the whole visual space of online images. One can type in words and the interface will locate you to a portion of the whole image space to get you started to explore it. The location of images and concept words around it give people a sense of where they are.

(2)"Contextual browsing" is a browsing interface for people to browse their own media contents by setting up the "context." One can type in words and will be returned with images, while the relative distances (locations) of images will change depending on the context. For example, by typing in geographical words like "Boston" and "New York," images tagged with MIT will be close to ones tagged with Fenway. But if one types in "baseball," images tagged with "Shea Stadium" in New York will be close to those tagged with Fenway in this case.

TaPuMa

TaPuMa is a digital, tangible public map that allows people to use their own belongings or the everyday objects they carry with them to access relevant, just-in-time information and to find locations of places or people. TaPuMa envisions that conventional maps can be augmented by using the unique identities and affordances of the everyday objects. The TaPuMa system uses a table-top environment where map and dynamic content is projected on the table. A camera mounted above the table identifies and tracks the locations of the objects on the surface. A software program identifies and registers the location of objects on the table. On the basis of identifications of the objects, the software program provides relevant information visualization to be shown on the table. The projector augments the table and objects on the table with projected digital information from overhead along with the map. The project explores a novel interaction mechanism where physical objects are used as interfaces to digital information. TaPuMa allows users to acquire information through tangible media, the things they carry.

TeleStory

TeleStory is a tangible interface for children to learn vocabulary through gestural experimentation. Children pair characters in a story and influence their actions through gestural input on the Siftables Platform (David Merrill) TeleStory allows children to influence the design of a television animation and learn the meanings of words by triggering actions in the narrative.

Here is a video of our prototype: click here .

the Sound of Touch

The Sound of Touch is a new instrument for real-time capture and sensitive physical stimulation of sound samples using digital convolution. The hand-held wand can be used to (1) record sound, then (2) brush, scrape, strike or otherwise physically manipulate this sound against physical objects. These actions produce sound in a manner that leverages peoples existing intuitions about sonic properties of physical materials. The Sound of Touch permits real-time exploitation of the sonic properties of a physical environment, to achieve a rich and expressive control of digital sound that is not typically possible in electronic sound synthesis and control systems.

Theme Stream

We are using intelligent interfaces to spatially organize streams of incoming information into coherent themes. Theme Stream helps us to deal with the ever-increasing streams of information generated around us by applying both supervised and unsupervised machine-learning techniques to the layout of information in the user interface.

thirdEye

thirdEye is a new technique that enables multiple viewers to see different things on a same display screen at the same time.

With thirdEye,

• We can have a public sign board where a Japanese tourist sees all the instructions in Japanese and an American in English.

• We don’t need to have the split screen in games now. Each player can see his/her personal view of the game on the TV screen.

• Two people watching TV can watch their favorite channel on a single TV screen.

• A public display can show secret messages or patterns.

• In the same movie theater, people can see different end of a suspense movie.

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Transitive Materials

Transitive Materials is an umbrella project encompassing novel materials, fabrication technologies, and traditional craft techniques which can operate in unison to create objects and spaces that realize truly omnipresent interactivity. We are developing interactive textiles, ubiquitous displays, and responsive spaces that seamlessly couple input, output, processing, communication, and power distribution, while preserving the uniqueness and emotional value of physical materials and traditional craft. Life in a Comic, Physical Heart in a Virtual Body, Augmented Pillows, Flexible Urban Display, Shutters, Sprout I/O, and Pulp-Based Computing are current instantiations of these technologies.

For more information, please visit: Transitive Materials.

WordPlay

“WordPlay” is a collaborative tabletop interface for generating, organizing, and exploring ideas. The concepts, ideas and arguments discussed in a meeting around the table are visualized and can be organized and manipulated in natural ways by the participants. Users add ideas to the table by speaking, manipulate the properties of words with hand gestures, and explore related concepts by tapping them. WordPlay combines Speech Recognition software, Natural Language Processing, a semantic knowledge network, and multi-touch capability to provide a public forum for brainstorming and support group decision making.

Words In Words: MIT Media Lab the Complete Series

xLink

xLink is a system for managing context information and marshalling service queries and data flow. The repeated re-invention of context management systems remains a perennial phenomenon in context aware and ubiquitous computing. Often, these systems are integrated into applications to accommodate the low level requirements of the underlying devices. We hope to address this issue by providing a framework that allows a clean, API-based separation of device, context, and service management functionalities without curtailing the capabilities of any segment. xLink is designed to allow commodity ubiquitous computing devices, particularly devices with highly constrained computational capabilities, to interface directly at a low level to the context management framework, while still providing a clean and versatile service Application Programming Interface (API) that allows applications maximum expressive freedom. .