Research Group Projects and Descriptions

The Physical Language Workshop designs tools for creating digital content in a networked environment, and the means by which the content can be leveraged as creative capital within an experimental online micro-economy that we call OPENSTUDIO. Our primary impact targets are in the areas of general digital media service architectures, global e-commerce, distance education, and visual information display systems.

E15 is an experimental architecture that places the power of the presentation of Web content into the hands of those that use it. Based on a dynamic, interactive, OpenGL-based scripting engine, E15 exposes an entirely new face to Web content, freely modifiable by each individual user.

E15:oGFx is a dynamic openGL texture engine. It provides an interface to a dynamic procedural texture generation context that can be modified at runtime. Using Python as the scripting language, E15:oGFx can be used for procedural animations and data visualizations. One goal of E15:oGFx is to increase the level of end user engagement with existing programs and foster additional creativity on top of scripts written by others within the E15 community. In contrast to traditional 2D graphics environments, E15:oGFx leverages openGL to reveal more than the standard 2D view of the script execution. In particular, the 2D canvas can be scaled in vector graphics sense, and the history of the script execution can be visualized. In addition to many graphics environments, E15:oGFx also supports dynamic loading of GLSL-based shaders, as well as procedural manipulation of shader parameters.

InfoField aims to seamlessly connect physical space with the ubiquitous network, helping users select information in a dense RFID-tagged environment. The system uses a wearable RFID reader that monitors every tag within range (~1.5m), and sensor-embedded RFID tags which provide orientation, light level, and proximity data along with their identification codes. InfoField derives the user’s interactions with the corresponding host object from the sensor data and enables browsing, logging, and selecting of the physical object’s data. This system, fully compatible with EPC protocol, expands the RFID application area, including location tracking, inventory monitoring, activity logging, physical manipulation of data, and recommender systems.

The goal of the Metazine is to provide a jumping-off point for research into the magazine of the future. We have developed an application for Internet tablets to supplement and enhance the content of paper magazines with digital content in a way that preserves the flexibility and robustness of the tried-and-true paper format. The Metazine follows coded links placed near articles and advertisements in a magazine to seamlessly deliver digital video or images on demand.

OPEN I/O provides a hardware base and a suite of network services for the development of I/O devices. With OPEN I/O, we aspire to make the creation of Ethernet-enabled devices accessible to artists and software engineers. OPEN I/O devices are automatically discovered by the OPEN I/O service and assigned to users who control the devices. Using the OPEN I/O router, devices can communicate with each other, or with network-based applications and computation, such as provided by OPENSTUDIO and OPENCODE. Users can configure and program their hardware remotely, and interact with similar hardware devices around the world. OPEN I/O provides common device libraries to help bridge the gap between software and hardware development.

Alumni Contributor(s): Harun Burak Arikan and Ishwinder Kaur

OPENCODE is a programming tool, perhaps the most elegantly simple programming environment ever. It offers “two click” programming for the inexperienced, along with sharing and tagging features for more advanced users. In essence, OPENCODE is a programming tool designed to leverage programming communities to enhance creative potential.

For new members of a work community, it can be difficult to learn the social landscape of the organization. Where are the casual meeting areas? When are people likely to be socially active? Are there spontaneous gatherings happening in parts of the workspace? OPENSPACE enables awareness of presence and activity by combining a grid of motion sensors with data logging, pattern analysis, and a variety of visualization techniques. With OPENSPACE, we aim to increase the social awareness of the larger spaces in which we work.

Alumni Contributor(s): Ishwinder Kaur and Sara Mustin

The Physical Language Workshop designs tools for creating digital content in a networked environment, and the means by which the content can be leveraged as creative capital within an experimental, online micro-economy that we call OPENSTUDIO. Our primary impact targets are in the areas of general digital media service architectures, global e-commerce, distance education, and visual information display systems.

Alumni Contributor(s): Harun Burak Arikan, James Dai, Annie Ding, Noah Fields, Brent Fitzgerald, Amber Frid-Jimenez, Ishwinder Kaur, Patrick Menard, William Norton, Carlos Andres Rocha, Jessica Rosenkrantz, Marc Schwartz and Danny Shen

OPENTAG is an RFID development platform for advancing ubiquitous electronic tagging of items and people. With OPENTAG, we break through the barrier of application-specific and proprietary RFID product engineering by developing our own tag and associated firmware. An OPENTAG can adapt to varying demands as a tagged item moves through its life cycle from manufacturing to supply-chain to retail to consumer to disposal. OPENTAG is security conscious and privacy friendly.

Alumni Contributor(s): Ishwinder Kaur and Danny Shen

PictureXS is a browser-constrained data repository that builds a semantic network of images and keywords. It explores issues related to user interfaces, organization and visualization of large amounts of digital content, and alternative ways of regulating social systems on the World Wide Web by avoiding the user account convention, and implementing a simple open censorship model.

RunLog is a simple Web application that keeps track of how much a user runs. For frequent runners, RunLog can be a useful tool to keep track of running goals. But RunLog was built to motivate people who spend most of their day working in front of a computer. Many people start running to get in shape as a New Year's resolution, and hopefully RunLog will help users maintain goals through the support of an online social network.

Space Saver is a system for importing physical spaces into virtual environments. The project provides tools that lower the complexity barrier to representing our physical spaces in a virtual world, in turn adding new levels of relevance to virtual representations. The system operates by amassing readings from a distance-sensing camera into models that can be imported into Second Life and other 3-D modeling software.

This project explores how merging ubiquitous consumer electronics and the sociable Web can improve the user experience of these devices, increase the functionality of both, and help distribute content in a more sociable way. Through custom software for digital video recorders and a Facebook application acting as a hub, we connect a community of television viewers via their televisions. By connecting these two technologies, the user can now see what her friends think of the shows available on her DVR, and automatically record her friends' favorites; in return, the user contributes her own viewing data back to the social network.