Calliope is the follow-up to the NeverEnding Drawing Machine. A portable, paper-based platform for interactive story making, it allows physical editing of shared digital media at a distance. The system is composed of a network of creation stations that seamlessly blend analog and digital media. Calliope documents and displays the creative process with no need to interact directly with a computer. By using human-readable tags and allowing any object to be used as material for creation, it offers opportunities for cross-cultural and cross-generational collaboration among peers with expertise in different media.

Photorefractive polymer has many attractive properties for dynamic holographic displays; however, the current display systems based around its use involve generating holograms by optical interference methods that complicate the optical and computational architectures of the systems and limit the kinds of holograms that can be displayed. We are developing a system to write computer-generated diffraction fringes directly from spatial light modulators to photorefractive polymers, resulting in displays with reduced footprint and cost, and potentially higher perceptual quality.

Extending the Living Observatory installation, we have instrumented the roots of several trees outside of E15 with vibratory transducers that excite the trees with live streaming sound from a forest near Plymouth, MA. Walking though the trees just outside the Lab, you won't notice anything, but press your ear up against one of them and you'll feel vibrations and hear sound from a tree 60 miles away. Visit at any time from dawn till dusk and again after midnight; if you’re lucky you might just catch an April storm, a flock of birds, or an army of frogs.

Pillow-Talk is the first of a series of objects designed to aid creative endeavors through the unobtrusive acquisition of unconscious self-generated content to permit reflexive self-knowledge. Composed of a seamless recording device embedded in a pillow, and a playback and visualization system in a jar, Pillow-Talk crystallizes that which we normally forget. This allows users to capture their dreams in a less mediated way, aiding recollection by priming the experience and providing no distraction for recall and capture through embodied interaction.

We are exploring ways to encode information exchange into preexisting natural interaction patterns, both between people and between a single user and objects with which he or she interacts on a regular basis. Two devices are presented to provoke thoughts regarding these information interchange modalities: a pair of gloves that requires two users to complete a "secret handshake" in order to gain shared access to restricted information, and a doorknob that recognizes the grasp of a user and becomes operational if the person attempting to use it is authorized to do so.

A basketball net incorporates segments of conductive fiber whose resistance changes with degree of stretch. By measuring this resistance over time, hardware associated with this net can calculate force and speed of a basketball traveling through the net. Applications include training, toys that indicate the force and speed on a display, “dunk competitions,” and augmented reality effects on television broadcasts. This net is far less expensive and more robust than other approaches to measuring data about the ball (e.g., photosensors or ultrasonic sensors) and doesn’t require a physical change to the hoop or backboard other than providing electrical connections to the net. Another application of the material is a flat net that can measure velocity of a ball hit or pitched into it (as in baseball or tennis), and can measure position as well (e.g., for determining whether a practice baseball pitch would have been a strike).