Copyright
Brian Mayton
What is the real impact of your smartphone on your ability to deeply engage in your daily activities?David Ramsay sets out to answer that q…
Project Overview The Space Grip Shoe (SGS) is an iconic concept presented across the history of space fiction, from 2001: A Space Odys…
In recent years, there has been an increase in low-cost and open-source electronic and chemical sensors that hobbyists, concerned citizens,…
The Tidmarsh Living Observatory Portal is a research project that focuses on the design and fabrication of a pavilion that will genera…
The Lut Desert of Iran is one of the most similar regions to Mars. Close to that area, there are vernacular adobe architectures that are hu…
In 2015, the director general of the European Space Agency (ESA), Jan Wörner, introduced the concept of the “Moon Village.” Inspired by the…
SpaceHuman is a soft robotics device designed to facilitate the exploration of environments with reduced gravity in a view of democratizati…
An astronaut's ability to leverage the sense of touch is substantially reduced when wearing a protective, pressurized spacesuit. We imagine…
Overview: The outermost skin of a space-based structure is designed using materials known to protect against the harsh elements of space. S…
We study textiles and nets as a base form for growing infrastructure and allowing reconfigurable sensing on low gravity bodies (for instanc…
I am developing a computational framework that acts as a real-time front end analysis system to a musical synthetic performer that ca…
Regenerative agriculture, or “carbon farming,” is the use of agricultural practices and crops that draw down excess atmospheric carbon thro…
TransparenSea is an AI system that uses video from tuna longline vessels as input to identify dangerous fishing practices while at sea.Comm…
Lighting conditions in an indoor environment have been shown to affect our cognition and behaviors in a variety of ways. On average, we spe…
Biological Carbon Pump (BCP), which refers to the transport of particulate organic carbon (POC) from the ocean’s surface to the bottom, dir…
In this work, we have developed a textile-based interactive surface fabricated through machine knitting technology. Our prototype exp…
Multimodal textile sensate media as an expressive and deformable musical interfaceIn the area of intelligent textiles, we are exploring a m…
Sound and space are fundamentally intertwined, at both a physical and perceptual level. Sound radiates from vibrating materials, filling …
Digital machine knitting is a highly programmable manufacturing process that has been utilized to produce apparel, accessories, and footwea…
ListenTree is an audio-haptic display embedded in the natural environment. Visitors to our installation notice a faint sound emerging from …
Rotational musical instrument interfaces are a very intuitive representation of the fundamentals of music itself, as they are inhe…
A transhumanist project towards co-evolution, rooted in desireI want to become a cephalopod is a trans-humanist proposal for using mo…
YOUR URGE TO BREATHE IS A LIE (a direct quote from my free-diving instructor) is a progressive approach towards innovation, human response …
¡ONWARDS + UNDER! proposes that as sea levels rise, particularly in highly populated coastal cities, the current plan to keep nature at bay…
SoundFORMS creates a new method for composers of electronic music to interact with their compositions. Through the use of a …
We introduce a family of fragile electronic musical instruments designed to be “played” through the act of destruction. Each Fragile Instru…
Can tattoos embrace technology in order to make the skin interactive?The DermalAbyss project was the result of a collaboration between MIT …
KickSoul is a wearable device that maps natural foot movements into inputs for digital devices. It consists of an insole with embedded sens…
Skrin is an exploration project on digitalized body skin surface using embedded electronics and prosthetics. Human skin is a means for prot…
Fluxa is a compact wearable device that exploits body movements, as well as the visual effects of persistence of vision (POV), to generate …
MMODM is an online drum machine based on the Twitter streaming API, using tweets from around the world to create and perform musical sequen…
As part of the Living Observatory ecological sensing initiative, we've been developing new approaches to mobile, wearable sensor data visua…
GroupLoop is a browser-based, collaborative audio feedback control system for musical performance. Upon logging in, GroupLoop users send th…
We are exploring the work piece as an interface to digital fabrication and digital modeling. Possible advantages include a more intuitive w…
Touch sensing has become established for a range of devices and systems both commercially and in academia. In particular, multi-touch scena…
The virtual messenger system acts as a portal to subtly communicate messages and pass information between the digital, virtual, and physica…
Gestures Everywhere is a multimodal framework for supporting ubiquitous computing. Our framework aggregates the real-time data from a wide …
In a series of psychometric experiments, we tested subjects' perception of lighting in a virtual environment to assess the possibility of d…
We developed a music control surface which enables integration between any musical instruments via a versatile, customizable, and inexpensi…
At present, luminous efficacy and cost remain the greatest barriers to broad adoption of LED lighting. However, it is anticipated that with…
Aerial imaging and sensor nodes each present a unique view point into the world. Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to navigate the same…
Current sports-medicine practices for understanding the motion of athletes while engaged in their sport of choice are limited to camera-bas…
We propose cutting as a novel paradigm for ad hoc customization of printed electronic components. As a first example we created a printed, …
The FreeD is a hand-held, digitally controlled milling device that is guided and monitored by a computer while still preserving the craftsp…
In DoppelLab, we are developing tools that intuitively and scalably represent the rich, multimodal sensor data produced by a building and i…
This project is a system of compact, wearable, wireless sensor nodes, equipped with full six-degree-of-freedom inertial measurement units a…
In the Living Observatory installation at the Other Festival, we invite participants into a transductive encounter with a wetland environme…
Our glass building lets us see across spaces�through the walls that enclose us and beyond. Yet invisibly, networks of sensors inside and ou…
Over the last decade, tracking people has attracted considerable research interest. Cameras enable efficient tracking of people but it is a…
The tongue has extremely dense sensing resolution, as well as an extraordinary degree of neuroplasticity�the ability to adapt to and intern…
Rapidnition is a new way of thinking about gesturally controlled interfaces. Rather than forcing users to adapt their behavior to a predef…
Funk2 is a novel process-description language that keeps track of everything that it does. Remembering these causal execution traces allows…
Using machine learning, computer vision, and wrist-worn, smaller, time-of-flight cameras, we can recover hand pose and micro-gesture (small…
The SEC is an extension to the free open-source program EyesWeb�that contains a large number of machine learning and signal processing algo…
We demonstrate the design and implementation of a new versatile, scalable, and cost-effective sensate surface. The system is based on a new…
Expressive musical re-performance is about enabling a person to experience the creative aspects of a playing a favorite song regardless of …
How can traditional values be embedded into a digital object? We explore this concept by implementing a special guitar that combines physic…
Increasing numbers of networked appliances are bringing about new opportunities for control and automation. At the same time, an increase i…
We are developing an opt-in camera network, in which users carrying wearable tags are visible to the network and everyone else is invisible…
How do we leverage people to make systems more intelligent, efficient, and successful? Is it worthwhile to involve people heavily in the go…
We are working with sponsor Schneider Electric to deploy a dense, low-power wireless sensor network aimed at environmental monitoring for s…
Digito is a gesturally controlled virtual musical instrument, controlled through a number of intricate hand gestures which provide both dis…
We are developing a system for inferring safety context on construction sites by fusing data from wearable devices, distributed sensing inf…
We have turned our building into a living laboratory by distributing 45 Ubiquitous Media Portals throughout our facility. These sensor-rich…
While many wearable sensors have been developed, few are actually worn by people on a regular basis. WristQue is a wristband sensor that is…
This project addresses human cognitive models of reflective problem solving in terms of psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligen…
The Dual Reality Lab is an experiment aimed at an interface between distributed sensor networks (which collect information about the real w…
The Gesture Recognition Toolkit (GRT) is a cross-platform, open-source, c++ machine-learning library that has been specifically designed fo…
This project takes advantage of our group's Ubiquitous Media Portals platform, which enables a large suite of research around the broad the…
The Sensor Network Application Retasking Framework (or SNARF) is a collection of tools for embedding a variant of the Python programming la…
This project explores the wide-scale distribution of low-power, low-cost sensor nodes that can measure temperature, humidity, light levels,…
This is a suite of devices and protocols to support applications in wearable human/social sensing linked to a distributed camera and vision…
Spinner is a Lab-wide sensor network platform designed to detect and capture fragmented events of human behavior that can be collected and …
This project presents a new approach for the design and fabrication of the acoustic instrument, using digital fabrication technologies, and…
Tricorder Net is a handheld sensor-network interface inspired by Star Trek's tricorder, a device that provided Science Officer Spock with i…
This project focuses on the development of a low-cost system to track the precise 3-D position of large numbers of objects tagged with pass…
We have built a configurable infrastructure to protect users' dynamic levels of�privacy in a pervasive sensor network. Our system is based …
We have developed an extremely low-power and low-cost wireless sensor network aimed at applications in asset tracking and ubiquitous activi…
This project demonstrates how sensor networks can couple the real world with virtual worlds. A complete sensor network system (hardware and…
Wireless sensor systems are currently being deployed in a wide variety of lightweight mobile applications such as detecting degenerative di…
The ubiquitous sensor network and media explorer integrates sound, images, and diverse data sampled throughout the Media Lab into a visual,…
We have developed a simple modular platform for wireless sensing. This system allows for easy prototyping and testing of embedded sensor ap…
The UbER-Badge is a small, wearable-computing platform for experimentation with distributed systems, and the analysis and enhancement of gr…
Most sensory data has limited utility without location information, and manual node localization becomes impossible for large, inaccessable…
We can use sensor networks as a way of building a comprehensive picture of a physical space to transmit a sense of that space into a virtua…
We have developed tightly coupled sensor network that tries to mimic some of the sensory characteristics of a natural skin. Developed in a …
Distributed sensor networks offer many new capabilities for monitoring environments with applicability to medical, industrial, military, en…
Although RFID technology is well established, there are some niches where RFID doesn't perform well (in the presence of metallic objects, o…
This research focuses on developing a smart material capable of sensing, distilling, and interpreting environmental stimuli while offering …
Miniature sensors are so sophisticated that a wristwatch-mounted inertial measurement system can differentiate subtle actions such as shaki…
We have built a compact piezoelectric push button and associated minimal circuitry that is able to transmit a digital RFID code to the imme…
The Pushpin Computing project demonstrates several concepts in distributed, embedded, and ubiquitous computing and dense sensor networks. S…
Roboverse is a physical artificial intelligence simulation. The environment supports rigid body physical simulation of wheeled and legged r…
A prime goal of ubiquitous computing is the embedding of sensing, communication, and computation into everyday objects. One consequence of …
We are investigating a novel pixellated vibrotactile device based on the hardware and software infrastructure developed in previous MLE-UL …
The massive sensor network assumed by most advanced scenarios of ubiquitous computing must first be innocously deployed in devices used for…
This project aims to create an electronic controller with many different sensor affordances that adapts to the gestural preferences of the …
Touch screen systems allow users to interact directly with content displayed on a 2-D surface. However, current systems have severe limitat…
Pushpin Computing is a research platform for exploring sensing techniques and algorithms on a dense sensor network of one hundred nodes dis…
The Nanogate is a micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) device capable of accurately and repeatedly controlling a nanometer gap between tw…
We are developing a wireless system of devices to monitor the condition of patients with chronic diseases. The patient will use these devic…
Motion and gait analyses have a number of applications in the medical field. For example, change in gait over extended time is used in neur…
The Tribble project demonstrates the application of dense, distributed sensor networks to electronic skins. The Tribble is a one-foot diame…
We are developing a set of very low-cost, wireless, wearable sensors that enable a large group of people (e.g., hundreds or thousands) to p…
The Media Matrix project draws on ideas from distributed, embedded, and parallel computing in order to address the creation and management …
This project pushes our work on the miniaturization of low-power radios and sensors for embedded intelligence into very small form factors …
Building on our Expressive Footwear project, we have constructed a low-cost, compact, wireless inertial measurement unit, featuring three a…
We are building a prototype infrastructure for real-time collection and distribution of comprehensive information about road traffic and co…
This project explores the application of new commercial RF chipsets and research devices being developed at the MIT Microelectronics Labora…
This project is developing a very novel noncontact microwave sensor system that detects the presence and activity of participants in front …
A very simple and inexpensive scanning laser rangefinder system has been developed for use as a precise gestural interface in front of a "s…
This effort has resulted in a compact, wireless, low-power sensor card that transmits 8 analog sensor channels (4 are conditioned for press…
Current 3-D laser scanning systems require a lengthy interval to complete each scan and require a clear line-of-sight, thereby severing the…
This project explores different applications for tapered-aperture audio transducers, where incoming acoustic wavefronts correlate with spat…
This project explores the use of passive acoustic sensing in automobiles. We are building acoustic sensing equimpment suitable for automoti…
As the power requirements for microelectronics continue decreasing, environmental energy sources can begin to replace batteries in certain …
The Atmosphere installation presents a large cloud of information on a wide presentation screen that can be manipulated by three handheld d…