The "Nominal Group Technique" is a popular way to brainstorm, often executed with Post-it notes and voting stickers. We're reimagining and reimplementing this technique for online use, for things such as hackathons, design workshops, and brainstorms across multiple geographies. The best part: everyone can take the results of the brainstorm with them, and embed it in blogs or websites.

Calling a person versus calling a place has quite distinctive affordances. With the arrival of mobile phones, the concept of calling has moved from calling a place to calling a person. Frontdesk proposes a place-based communication tool that is accessed primarily through any mobile device and features voice calls and text chat. The application uses “place” loosely to define a physical space created by a group of people that have a shared context of that place. Examples of places could be different parts of a workspace in a physical building, such as the machine shop, café, or Speech + Mobility group area at the Media Lab. When a user calls any of these places, frontdesk routes their call to all people that are “checked-in” to the place.

Bringing deliberative process and consensus decision making to the 21st century! A practical set of tools for assisting in meeting structure, deliberative process, brainstorming, and negotiation. Helping groups to democratically engage with each other, across geographies and time zones.

Mime is a compact, low-power 3D sensor for short-range gestural control of small display devices. The sensor's performance is based on a novel signal processing pipeline that combines low-power time-of-flight (TOF) sensing for 3D hand-motion tracking with RGB image-based computer vision algorithms for finer gestural control. Mime is an addition to a growing number of input devices developed around the engineering design philosophy of sacrificing generality for battery-friendly and accurate performance to retain the portability advantages of our smart devices. We demonstrate the utility of Mime for Head Mounted Display control and smart phones with a variety of application scenarios, including 3D spatial input using close range gestures, gaming, on-the-move interaction, and operation in cluttered environments and in broad daylight conditions.

OnTheRun is a location-based exercise game designed for the iPhone. The player assumes the role of a fugitive trying to gather clues to clear his name. The game is played outdoors while running, and the game creates missions that are tailored to the player's neighborhood and running ability. The game is primarily an audio experience, and gameplay involves following turn-by-turn directions, outrunning virtual enemies, and reaching destinations.

How can one understand and visualize the lifestyle of a person on the other side of the world? Puzzlaef attempts to tackle this question through a mobile picture puzzle game where users collaboratively solve with pictures from their lifestyles.

The experience of being in a crowd is visceral. We feel a sense of connection and belonging through shared experiences like watching a sporting event, speech, or performance. In online environments, though, we are often part of a crowd without feeling it. ROAR is designed to allow very large groups of distributed spectators have meaningful conversations with strangers or friends while creating a sense of presence of thousands of other spectators. ROAR is also interested in creating opportunities for collective action among spectators and providing flexible ways to share content among very large groups. These systems combine to let you feel the roar of the crowd even if you're alone in your bedroom.

Turning screen time into activity time, Spellbound is a cooperatively competitive real-time, real-world multiplayer mobile game. It uses a fantasy game context to connect and bring people together around a shared experience, create serendipitous connections, and encourage new kinds of activities in existing physical spaces. The game is freed from the screen and interlaced with the real world by using mobile phones. The game system uses activity detection via sensors on the mobile phone and presence and location detection via GPS. Communication with the game is done using speech interaction with the phone, and output is displayed on the phone screen as well as through a custom wristband interface. Spellbound explores the space between real-world physical activities and fantastical video-game worlds as a place to create new social experiences for both players and audience.

Distributed meetings present a set of interesting challenges to staying engaged and involved. Because one person speaks at a time, it is easy (particularly for remote participants) to disengage from the meeting undetected. However, non-speaking roles in a meeting can be just as important as speaking ones, and if we could give non-speaking participants ways to participate, we could help support better-run meetings of all kinds. Tin Can collects background tasks like taking notes, managing the agenda, sharing relevant content, and tracking to-dos in a distributed interface that uses meeting participants' phones and laptops as input devices, and represents current meeting activities on an iPad in the center of the table in each meeting location. By publicly representing these background processes, we provide meeting attendees with new ways to participate and be recognized for their non-verbal participation.