Tangible Media

The AFK cookset is designed for the hungry role-playing gamer who can connect her food items, e.g., Spicy Wolf Dumplings, to her online cooking habits. By scanning in the food items, the video game physically adjusts a hot plate to cook the item for the correct amount of time. The virtual character then jubilantly announces the status of the meal to both the gamer and the other individuals playing online: “O la la my roasted raptor is about to be done!” When the food is ready, the system automatically puts the character in AFK (‘Away From Keyboard’) mode to provide the gamer with a moment to eat. When the player resumes playing, he or she might just discover his or her character’s behavior is affected by the food consumed in real life—sluggish from overeating or alternately exuberant and energetic.

Bosu is a design tool offering kinetic memory—the ability to record and play back motion in 3-D space—for soft materials. It is used for motion prototyping and digitally augmented form finding, combining dynamic modeling with coincident sensing and actuation to create transformable structures. The system consists of varying modular units of bend sensors paired with shape memory alloy (nitinol) actuators woven into a bendable plastic frame and embedded in fabric. Each module can actuate between two positions and together form three-dimensional motion pixels.

We present the design of a cost-effective, wearable sensor to detect and indicate the strength and other characteristics of the electric field emanating from a laptop display. Our bracelet can provide an immediate awareness of electric fields radiated from a frequently used object, thus supporting awareness of ambient background emanation beyond human perception. We discuss how detection of such radiation might help to "fingerprint" devices and aid in applications that require determination of indoor location.

We are exploring how to navigate large information spaces naturally, quickly, and seamlessly between graphical and physical space using body and gesture. The goal is to create an interface where users can manipulate digital space as if they were using telekinesis.

We are developing gestural interaction techniques and applications using the g-speak platform from Oblong Industries. This work seeks to blend the value of physical, tangible interfaces with the power of gestural interaction. Our goal is to create seamless interfaces that scale and adapt between ambulatory and manipulatory, physical and graphical, ambient and direct, and representational and abstract—interfaces that can break the boundaries of existing paradigms.

Jabberstamp is the first tool that allows children to synthesize drawings and voices. To use Jabberstamp, children create drawings, collages, or paintings on normal paper, and then press a special rubber stamp onto the page to record sounds into their drawings. When they touch the marks of the stamp with a small trumpet, the sounds play back, retelling the stories they have created. Jabberstamp can be used to embed names, narratives, characters' voices, and environmental sound effects into drawings, helping children to communicate their stories with peers and adults, and allowing them to record and situate stories in personally meaningful contexts to share with others—before they have mastered writing.

Picture This! is a video editing tool progressing toward children's natural expression of play while telling stories with their toys. We use technology to offer visual feedback regarding how the scene looks from the point of view of an imaginary audience. If the toy has an immediately accessible visual perspective, a new world is opened to the child. The toy helps her explore visual and narrative perspectives of character props, expanding the discovery of her environment. The child storyteller enters the world of the movie maker. Cameras become part of a toy system showing how things look from a toy's point of view. They can be integrated in LEGO people, car drivers, and even coffee mugs! The video process, supported by gesture-induced editing, benefits children in practicing social interrelationships and visual perspective taking.

Piezing is an outfit which generates power using the natural gestures of the human body in motion. Around the joints of the elbows and hips, the garment is embedded with piezoelectric material elements which generate an electric potential in response to applied mechanical stress. The electric potential is then stored as voltage in a centralized small battery and later can be discharged into a device.

Psychohaptics explores a diverse set of simulations of touch modalities to assist in the treatment of specific mental disorders. Based on the most promising touch-therapy protocols, we have developed haptic interfaces for psychotherapy that we aim to test in a local hospital.

SandScape is a tangible interface for designing and understanding landscapes through a variety of computational simulations using sand. The simulations are projected on the surface of a sand model representing the terrain; users can choose from a variety of different simulations highlighting height, slope, contours, shadows, drainage, or aspect of the landscape model, and alter its form by manipulating sand while seeing the resulting effects of computational analysis generated and projected on the surface of sand in real time. SandScape demonstrates an alternative form of computer interface (tangible user interface) that takes advantage of our natural abilities to understand and manipulate physical forms while still harnessing the power of computational simulation to help in our understanding of a model representation.

Sensetable is a system that wirelessly, quickly, and accurately tracks the positions of multiple objects on a flat display surface. The tracked objects have a digital state, which can be controlled by physically modifying them using dials or tokens. We have developed several new interaction techniques and applications on top of this platform. Our current work focuses on business supply-chain visualization using system-dynamics simulation.

Sourcemap is a social network built around supply chains. The free and open Web-based tool allows producers to publish their sourcing strategies as part of marketing a transparent business practice. Sourcemap is built on a free, open calculator that allows anyone to estimate the environmental impact and the geographical spread of individual products' supply chains. We are actively seeking collaborators and partners to help develop and apply Sourcemap across a range of business sectors.

Stress OutSourced (SOS) is a peer-to-peer network that allows anonymous users to send each other therapeutic massages to relieve stress. By applying the emerging concept of crowdsourcing to haptic therapy, SOS brings physical and affective dimensions to our already networked lifestyle while preserving the privacy of its members. SOS is an exploration and illustration of a new field of haptic social networking.

Tangible Bits is our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). People have developed sophisticated skills for sensing and manipulating our physical environments, but traditional GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) do not employ most of these skills. Tangible Bits builds upon these skills by giving physical form to digital information, seamlessly coupling the dual worlds of bits and atoms. We are designing "tangible user interfaces" that employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information. These include foreground interactions with graspable objects and augmented surfaces, exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia. We are also exploring background information displays that use "ambient media": ambient light, sound, airflow, and water movement. Here, we seek to communicate digitally mediated senses of activity and presence at the periphery of human awareness. The goal is to change the "painted bits" of GUIs to "tangible bits," taking advantage of the richness of multimodal human senses and skills developed through our lifetimes of interaction with the physical world.

Topobo is a 3-D constructive assembly system embedded with kinetic memory—the ability to record and play back physical motion. Unique among modeling systems is Topobo’s coincident physical input and output behaviors. By snapping together a combination of passive (static) and active (motorized) components, users can quickly assemble dynamic, biomorphic forms such as animals and skeletons, animate those forms by pushing, pulling, and twisting them, and observe the system repeatedly playing back those motions. For example, a dog can be constructed and then taught to gesture and walk by twisting its body and legs. The dog will then repeat those movements.

Touch·Sensitive is a wearable device that leverages stress and provides comfort for people on the move. It is determined by how the body reacts to the bag-load user's support, and we position this research within wearable devices that consider body specifics in their design. A series of observations using ethnographic methods informed us of how our apparel can soothe people who suffer from bag overload and can connect to the technologies users carry.

Trackmate is an open-source initiative to create an inexpensive, do-it-yourself tangible tracking system. The Trackmate tracker allows any computer to recognize tagged objects and their corresponding position, rotation, and color information when placed on a surface. With over 280 trillion possible visual markers, each tagged object can be unique in the world and work seamlessly across any Trackmate system. Trackmate sends all object data via LusidOSC (a protocol layer for unique spatial input devices), allowing any LusidOSC-based application to use the spatial object information.

The Wetpaint project investigates new interfaces for exploring the history of a work of visual art. We are seeking intuitive metaphors for touch-screen interaction, including virtually scraping through the multispectral scans of an ancient painting, and pulling, stretching, and tearing through a virtual canvas. The interaction techniques refined through Wetpaint are being built into a Web-based tool for leveraging collective intelligence toward the pursuit of art diagnostics.

The WoW Pod is an immersive architectural space that provides and anticipates all life needs of the World of Warcraft player. Outfitted with toilet throne, hydration system, and meals at the ready, the WoW Pod makes daily human function possible without ever stepping away from the game. The project received grants from the Council for the Arts at MIT and the SHASS's Peter de Florez Fund for Humor.