The living room is the heart of social and communal interactions in a home. Often present in this space is a screen: the television. When in use, this communal gathering space brings together people and their interests, and their varying needs for company, devices, and content. This project focuses on using personal devices such as mobile phones with the television; the phone serves as a controller and social interface by offering a channel to convey engagement, laughter, and viewer comments, and to create remote co-presence.

Inspired by the fact that people are communicating more and more through technology, Flickr This explores ways for people to have emotion-rich conversations through all kinds of media provided by people and technology—a way for technology to allow remote people to have conversations more like face-to-face experiences by grounding them in shared media. Flickr This lets viewable contents provide structure for a conversation; with a grounding on the viewable contents, conversation can move between synchronous and asynchronous, and evolve into a richer collaborative conversation/media.

When friends give directions, they often don't describe the whole route, but instead provide landmarks along the way which with they think we'll be familiar. Friends can assume we have certain knowledge because they know our likes and dislikes. Going My Way attempts to mimic a friend by learning about where you travel, identifying the areas that are close to the desired destination from your frequent path, and picking a set of landmarks to allow you to choose a familiar one. When you select one of the provided landmarks, Going My Way will provide directions from it to the destination.

We present an indoor positioning system that measures location using disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field by structural steel elements in a building. The presence of these large steel members warps the geomagnetic field such that lines of magnetic force are locally not parallel. We measure the divergence of the lines of the magnetic force field using e-compass parts with slight physical offsets; these measurements are used to create local position signatures for later comparison with values in the same sensors at a location to be measured. We demonstrate accuracy within one meter 88% of the time in experiments in two buildings and across multiple floors within the buildings.

LocoRadio is a mobile, augmented-reality, audio browsing system that immerses you within a soundscape as you move. To enhance the browsing experience in high-density spatialized audio environments, we introduce a UI feature, "auditory spatial scaling," which enables users to continuously adjust the spatial density of perceived sounds. The audio will come from a custom, geo-tagged audio database. The current demo uses iconic music to represent restaurants. As users move in the city, they encounter a series of music and the perception enhances their awareness of the numbers, styles, and locations of nearby restaurants.

Musicpainter is a networked, graphical composing environment that encourages sharing and collaboration within the composing process. It provides a social environment where users can gather and learn from each other. The approach is based on sharing and managing music creation in small and large scales. At the small scale, users are encouraged to begin composing by conceiving small musical ideas, such as melodic or rhythmic fragments, all of which are collected and made available to all users as a shared composing resource. The collection provides a dynamic source of composing material that is inspiring and reusable. At the large scale, users can access full compositions that are shared as open projects. Users can listen to and change any piece. The system generates an attribution list on the edited piece, allowing users to trace how it evolves in the environment.

How many decisions does it take before you hear a desired piece of music on your iPod? First, you are asked to pick a genre, then an artist, then an album, and finally a song. The more songs you own, the tougher the choices are. To resolve the issues, we turn the modern music player into an old analog radio tuner, the Radio-ish Media Player. No LCDs, no favorite channels, all you have is a knob that will help you surf through channel after channel accompanied by synthesized noise. Radio-ish is our attempt to revive the lost art of channel surfing in the old analog radio tuner. Let music find you: your ears will tell you if the music is right. This project is not only a retrospective design, but also our reflection on lost simplicity in the process of digitalization. A mobile phone version is also available for demo.

Now that mobile phones are starting to have 3D display and capture capabilities, there are opportunities to enable new applications that enhance person-person communication or person-object interaction. This project explores one such application: acquiring 3D models of objects using cell phones with stereo cameras. Such models could serve as shared objects that ground communication in virtual environments and mirrored worlds or in mobile augmented reality applications.

In online environments, we often rely on some combination of pictures and pseudonyms to show others what kind of person we are. In more anonymous contexts, we tend to rely on non-representational images while on services like Facebook, identifiable pictures are the norm. In this project, we seek to turn the iconic profile picture into something more active and dynamic. With tailor, you can easily apply dynamic graphical effects and data-driven information to an existing profile picture on Twitter. Tailor will automatically update your profile picture based on these overlays. These overlays might include your current location, number of followers, or visualizations of your favorite team's recent record. Tailor will also support scenarios like automatically updating your picture when you upload pictures to Flickr, visually aging pictures the longer you have them, morphing between different pictures, or programmatically generating interesting abstract profile pictures.