Research Projects
Air Mobs
Andy Lippman, Henry Holtzman and Eyal ToledanoAirmobs is a community-based P2P cross-operator WiFi tethering market. It provides network connectivity when one device has no available Internet connection or roaming costs are too high, and another device has excellent network connectivity and a full battery. Airmobs barters air time between different mobile phone users using WiFi tethering to locate and establish an internet link though another device that has a good 3G connection. The member that provides the link will gain airtime credit that can be used when he is notconnected. Airmobs creates incentive via a secondary market–a user will be willing to share his data connection since he will get data in return. The synergetic value emerges when different users on different mobile operators provide network access to each other, compensating for each operator's out-of-coverage areas.
Barter: A Market-Incented Wisdom Exchange
Creative and productive information interchange in organizations is often stymied by a perverse incentive setting among the members. We transform that competition into a positive exchange by using market principles. Specifically, we apply innovative market mechanisms to construct incentives while still encouraging pro-social behaviors. Barter includes means to enhance knowledge sharing, innovation creation, and productivity. It is being tested at MIT and in three sponsor companies and is becoming available as a readily installable package. We will measure the results and test the effectiveness of an information market in addressing organizational challenges. We are learning that transactions in rich markets can become an organizing principle among people potentially as strong as social networks.Dawei Shen, Marshall Van Alstyne and Andrew LippmanBrin.gy: What Brings Us Together
Henry Holtzman, Andy Lippman and Polychronis YpodimatopoulosWe allow people to form dynamic groups focused on topics that emerge serendipitously during everyday life. They can be long-lived or flower only for a short time. Examples include people interested in buying the same product, those with similar expertise, those in the same location, or any collection of such attributes. We call this the Human Discovery Protocol (HDP). Similar to how computers follow well-established protocols like DNS in order to find other computers that carry desired information, HDP presents an open protocol for people to announce bits of information about themselves, and have them aggregated and returned back in the form of a group of people that match against the user’s specified criteria. We experiment with a web-based implementation (brin.gy) that allows users to join and communicate with groups of people based on their location, profile information, and items they may want to buy or sell.
CoCam
Andy Lippman, Henry Holtzman, Eyal Toledano, Dan SawadaCollaborating and media creation are difficult tasks, both for people and for network architectures. CoCam is a self-organizing network for real-time camera image collaboration. Like all camera apps, just point and shoot; CoCam then automatically joins other media creators into a network of collaborators. Network discovery, creation, grouping, joining, and leaving is done automatically in the background, letting users focus on participation in an event. We use local P2P middleware and a 3G negotiation service to create these networks for real-time media sharing. CoCam also provides multiple views that make the media experience more exciting–such as appearing to be in multiple places at the same time. The media is immediately distributed and replicated in multiple peers, thus if a camera phone is confiscated other users have copies of the images.
Compound Interest
Andy Lippman, Julia Shuhong Ma and Sherwin WuHow are people's interests related? By exploring people's interests from LinkedIn profiles, we have created an interest graph to understand these relationships. The graph nodes are interests (hiking, painting, design), color-coded by category. Links between nodes appear when interests co-occur in multiple profiles. By looking at the graph, we can see which interests are more commonly shared among people, and whether these interests are in the same category (that is, similar to each other). This allows us to form hypotheses about how and why certain interests co-occur more often than others, and measure the diversity of a person's interests.
Electric Price Tags
Andy Lippman, Matthew Blackshaw and Rick BorovoyElectric Price Tags are a realization of a mobile system that is linked to technology in physical space. The underlying theme is that being mobile can mean far more than focusing on a portable device—it can be the use of that device to unlock data and technology embedded in the environment. In its current version, users can reconfigure the price tags on a store shelf to display a desired metric (e.g., price, unit price, or calories). While this information is present on the boxes of the items for sale, comparisons would require individual analysis of each box. The visualization provided by Electric Price Tags allows users to view and filter information in physical space in ways that was previously possible only online.
Geo.gy: Location shortener
Polychronis YpodimatopoulosWere you ever in the middle of a conversation and needed to share your location with the other party? Geo.gy is a location shortener service. It allows you to easily share your location with your peers by encoding it in a short URL which we call a "geolink". It is platform-independent, based on HTML5, so you can use any device with a modern browser to generate a geolink, simply by visiting the project's page. There are no user accounts so geolinks remain anonymous. You can use Geo.gy to add location context to a post, SMS, anything you want decorated with location context.
Line of Sound
Grace Rusi Woo, Rick Borovoy and Andy LippmanWe show how data can be used to deliver sound information only in the direction in which one looks. The demonstration is done using two 55-inch screens which are transmitting both human and machine relevant information. Each screen is used to show a video which flashes a single bit indicator which transmits to a camera mounted on headphones. This is used to distinguish between the two screens, and to correlate an audio track to the video track.
Meld
Hiroshi Ishii, Andy Lippman, Matthew Blackshaw, Anthony DeVincenzi and David LakatosMeld provides a new perspective on your social life. By presenting your social graph as a moving picture, Meld breaks free from the text-centric interfaces of today's social networks, offering a fresh, holistic perspective. Unseen trends, before lost in mountains of text, can be better understood, providing an organic and evolving view of your relationships. Meld is a semi-finalist in the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
NewsFlash
Andy Lippman, Grace Rusi Woo and Travis RichNewsFlash is a social way to experience the global and local range of current events. People see a tapestry of newspaper front-pages. The headlines and main photos tell part of the story, NewsFlash tells you the rest. People point their phones at a headline or picture of interest to bring up a feed of the article text from that given paper. The data emanates from the screen and and is captured by a cell phone camera–any number of people can see it at once and discuss the panoply of ongoing events. NewsFlash creates a local space that is simultaneously interactive and provocative. We hope it gets people talking.
Peddl
Andy Lippman, Hiroshi Ishii, Matthew Blackshaw, Anthony DeVincenzi and David LakatosPeddl creates a localized, perfect market. All offers are broadcasts, allowing users to spot trends, bargains, and opportunities. With GPS- and Internet-enabled mobile devices in almost every pocket, we see an opportunity for a new type of marketplace which takes into account your physical location, availability, and open negotiation. Like other real-time activities, we are exploring transactions as an organizing principle among people that, like Barter, may be strong, rich, and long-lived.
Point & Shoot Data
Travis RichPoint & Shoot Data explores the use of visible light as a wireless communication medium for mobile devices. A snap-on case allows users to send messages to other mobile devices based on directionality and proximity. No email address, phone number, or account login is needed, just point and shoot your messages! The project enables infrastructure-free, scalable, proximity-based communication between two mobile devices.
Reach
Andy Lippman, Boris G Kizelshteyn and Rick BorovoyReach merges inherently local communications with user requests or offers of services. It is built atop data from services users already use, like Facebook and Google Latitude. Reach is intended to demonstrate a flexible, attractive mobile interface that allows one to discover "interesting" aspects of the environment and to call upon services as needed. These can range from a broadcast offer to serve as a triage medic, to a way to share a cab or get help for a technical service problem like plugging into a video projector.
Recompose
Matthew Blackshaw, Anthony DeVincenzi, David Lakatos, and Hiroshi IshiiHuman beings have long shaped the physical environment to reflect designs of form and function. As an instrument of control, the human hand remains the most fundamental interface for affecting the material world. In the wake of the digital revolution, this is changing, bringing us to reexamine tangible interfaces. What if we could now dynamically reshape, redesign, and restructure our environment using the functional nature of digital tools? To address this, we present Recompose, a framework allowing direct and gestural manipulation of our physical environment. Recompose complements the highly precise, yet concentrated affordance of direct manipulation with a set of gestures, allowing functional manipulation of an actuated surface.
Social Transactions/Open Transactions
Andy Lippman, Kwan Lee, Dawei Shen, Eric Shyu and Phumpong WatanaprakornkulSocial Transactions is an application that allows communities of consumers to collaboratively sense the market from mobile devices, enabling more informed financial decisions in a geo-local and timely context. The mobile application not only allows users to perform transactions, but also to inform, share, and purchase in groups at desired times. It could, for example, help people connect opportunistically in a local area to make group purchases, pick up an item for a friend, or perform reverse auctions. Our framework is an Open Transaction Network that enables applications from restaurant menu recommendations to electronics purchases. We tested this with MIT's TechCASH payment system to investigate whether shared social transactions could provide just-in-time influences to change behaviors.
T(ether)
Hiroshi Ishii, Andy Lippman, Matthew Blackshaw and David LakatosT(ether) is a novel spatially aware display that supports intuitive interaction with volumetric data. The display acts as a window affording users a perspective view of three- dimensional data through tracking of head position and orientation. T(ether) creates a 1:1 mapping between real and virtual coordinate space allowing immersive exploration of the joint domain. Our system creates a shared workspace in which co-located or remote users can collaborate in both the real and virtual worlds. The system allows input through capacitive touch on the display and a motion-tracked glove. When placed behind the display, the user’s hand extends into the virtual world, enabling the user to interact with objects directly.
T+1
Dawei Shen, Rick Borovoy and Andrew LippmanT+1 is an application that creates an iterative structure to help groups organize their interests and schedules. Users of T+1 receive instructions and send their personal information through mobile devices at discretized time steps, orchestrated by a unique, adaptive scheduling engine. At each time-step t, T+1 takes as inputs several relevant factors of human interactions, such as participants' interests, opinions, locations, and partner matching schedules. It then computes and optimizes the structure and format of a group interactions for the next interval. T+1 facilitates consensus formation, better group dynamics, and more engaging user experiences by using a clearly visible and comprehensible process. We are planning to deploy the platform in both academic and political discussion settings, analyze how user opinions and interests evolve in time to understand its efficacy.
The Glass Infrastructure
Henry Holtzman, Andy Lippman, Matthew Blackshaw, Jon Ferguson, Catherine Havasi, Julia Ma, Daniel Schultz and Polychronis YpodimatopoulosThis project builds a social, place-based information window into the Media Lab using 30 touch-sensitive screens strategically placed throughout the physical complex and at sponsor sites. The idea is get people to talk among themselves about the work that they jointly explore in a public place. We present Lab projects as dynamically connected sets of "charms" that visitors can save, trade, and explore. The GI demonstrates a framework for an open, integrated IT system and shows new uses for it.
VR Codes
Andy Lippman and Grace WooVR Codes are dynamic data invisibly hidden in television and graphic displays. They allow the display to present simultaneously visual information in an unimpeded way, and real-time data to a camera. Our intention is to make social displays that many can use at once; using VR codes, many can draw data from a display and control its use on a mobile device. We think of VR Codes as analogous to QR codes for video, and envision a future where every display in the environment contains latent information embedded in VR codes.
