Research
Camera Culture

Making the invisible visible–inside our bodies, around us, and beyond–for health, work, and connection
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Fluid Interfaces

Designing Systems for Cognitive Support
Project Research

Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

InspirationSleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a thir…
Research
Media Lab Research Theme: Connected Mind + Body

Connected Mind + Body | Revolutionizing the future of mental and physical wellbeing
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Media Lab Research Theme: Cultivating Creativity

Cultivating Creativity | Catalyzing a global movement enabling everyone to unlock and unleash their individual and collective creativity
Project Research

Theme | Learning + Creativity

Several of our projects aim to support learning and creativity. While some systems focus on a specific skill to be strengthened, e.g.,…
Project Research

KALM: BCI Systems for Managing Anxiety and Stress

The KALM project consists of a multimodal dataset and a wearable system for managing anxiety.  With this set of tools we aim to make n…
Project Research

Pharmamusicology: Exploring the Impact of Music on the Physiology and Psychology of Mental Health

As of 2020, approximately 40 million adults, or 18.1% percent of the adult population, in the United States suffer from anxiety disorders, …
Article Research

"Dream glove" boosts creativity during sleep

In a new study, researchers from the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group & Harvard Medical School find that brief naps can enhance creativity
Article Research

Does dream inception work?

Using Dormio, a project from the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces research group, poet Will Dowd set out to pioneer a new reading experience.
Article Research

Here's how to use dreams for creative inspiration

Researchers from the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group and Harvard Medical School find that brief naps appear to enhance creativity.
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Responsive Environments

Augmenting and mediating human experience, interaction, and perception with sensor networks
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Affective Computing

Advancing human wellbeing by developing new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion
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Sculpting Evolution

Cultivating wisdom through evolutionary and ecological engineering
Article Research

Unlocking the Power of Goosebumps: The Surprising Emotional Effects of Aesthetic Chills

A new study suggests that experiencing aesthetic chills, or goosebumps, during stimuli like music and films can lead to increased emotions.
Article Research

Behind the veil of hypnagogic sleep

Media Lab postdoc Adam Haar Horowitz discusses using “dream engineering” techniques to give people more control over their dreams.
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Human Dynamics

Exploring how social networks can influence our lives in business, health, governance, and technology adoption and diffusion
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Research
Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
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Personal Robots

Building intelligent personified technologies that collaborate with people to help them learn, thrive, and flourish.
Article Research

That moment when you’re nodding off is a sweet spot for creativity

A new study finds people are more creative after waking from the earliest stage of sleep, especially when guided to dream about a topic.
Project Research

Targeted Dream Incubation

Targeted dream incubation (TDI) is a methodology for guiding (or “incubating”) dreams towards specific themes. Please read the FAQ below to…
Publication Research

Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

Haar Horowitz, Adam, Ishaan Grover, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Cynthia Breazeal, and Pattie Maes. "Dormio: Interfacing with dreams." In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-10. 2018.
Project Research

Towards a Congruent Hybrid Reality without Experiential Artifacts

​Situated VR: Towards a Congruent Hybrid RealityThe vision of Extended Reality (XR) systems is living in a hybrid reality or "Metaverse" wh…
Research
Opera of the Future

Extending expression, learning, and health through innovations in musical composition, performance, and participation
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Project Research

Essence Wearables: Biometric Olfactory Interfaces for Day and Night

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has traditionally focused on designing and investigating interfaces that provide explicit visual, auditory…
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Thesis Research

Investigating the Use of Synthetic Media and Real-Time Virtual Camera Filters for Supporting Communication and Creativity

Leong, Joanne. Investigating the Use of Synthetic Media and Real-Time Virtual Camera Filters for Supporting Communication and Creativity. 2021. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MS Thesis.
Publication Research

Exploring the Use of Real-Time Camera Filters on Embodiment and Creativity

Leong, Joanne, et al. "Exploring the Use of Real-Time Camera Filters on Embodiment and Creativity." Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2021.
Project Research

Synthetic Self-Perception

Perceptual illusions have the power to change our abilities and behaviours. Prior research in virtual reality (VR) has shown that transport…
Inventing the future of digitally augmented objects and environments.
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Research
Collective Learning

Transforming data into knowledge
Article Research

New Study Highlights Opportunities for Artificial Emotional Intelligence

MIT uses affective computing in efforts to improve human mental health.
Project Research

Dyadic Affect in Multimodal Interaction - Parent to Child (DAMI-P2C) Dataset

Audio-visual data set containing around 21.6 hours of parent-child interaction during story reading.The DAMI-P2C dataset consists of audio-…
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Research
ML Learning

ML Learning
Center for Civic Media
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Research
Object-Based Media

Changing storytelling, communication, and everyday life through sensing, understanding, and new interface technologies
Article Research

The Science Behind Creativity

Seli is an assistant professor at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and also an artist. He uses Dormio to tap into hypnagogia.
Archived
Project Research

SPRING: A Smart Platform for Research, Intervention, and Neurodevelopmental Growth

SPRING is a custom-built hardware and software platform for children with neuro-differences. The system automates data acquisition, optimiz…
Archived
Article Research

Podcast: Night Shifts

Perchance to dream engineer: on new research into our sleeping minds
Article Research

Night Shifts

In the April issue, Michael W. Clune writes about the profound insights offered by the Dormio: "Can technology shape our dreams?"
Article Research

The consequences of hacking our dreams

Advertisers are beginning to explore ways to market products to people while they sleep. A group of scientists talked to NPR about the risks
Article Research

Inside your dreamscape

Dream-hacking techniques can help us create, heal and have fun. They could also become tools of commercial manipulation.
How buildings and cities can become more intelligently responsive to the needs and desires of their inhabitants.
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Article Research

Are advertisers coming for your dreams?

"We can see the waves forming a tsunami that will come, but most people are just sleeping on a beach unaware"
Archived
Project Research

Multi-SPRING

OverviewWe have created a new customizable, multi-user research-through-play platform designed to facilitate social skill development for c…
Archived
Article Research

Advertisers are hijacking your dreams, scientists say

This is the actual stuff of nightmares.
Article Research

Companies are ready to experiment with advertising in your dreams, and experts are sounding the alarm

Sleep and dream researchers are urging for an advance tightening of advertising law to nip all this in the bud before it starts in earnest.
Article Research

Neuroscientists warn advertisers are trying to 'weaponize sleep' by plugging into your dreams

“The potential for misuse of these technologies is as ominous as it is obvious.”
Article Research

Nightmare scenario: Alarm as advertisers seek to plug into our dreams

After Coors sought to steer unconscious minds to thoughts of beer, scientists have called for curbs on ‘targeted dream incubation.’
Project Research

Frisson

Interoceptive Technologies: Inducing emotions from the body upInspirationThere’s a feeling that comes tingling down the spine in certain mo…
Archived
Project Research

SeqCLR: Self-supervised learning of features for time-series data

Interpreting human electroencephalogram (EEG) is a challenging task and requires years of medical training. We present a framework for lear…
Archived
Article Research

Scientists engineer dreams to understand the sleeping brain

Researchers in the Fluid Interfaces group and elsewhere are hoping to learn more about how and why dreams are generated, and their effects.
Project Research

SkipNorm

Skip Norm is a new and flexible building block for Deep Learning that serves as a skip connection and normalization block simultaneously. I…
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Research
Synthetic Neurobiology

Revealing insights into the human condition and repairing brain disorders via novel tools for mapping and fixing brain computations
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Project Research

Tools for mapping the molecular architecture and wiring of the brain

Complex biological systems such as brain circuits are extended 3-D structures made out of nanoscale building blocks such as proteins, RNAs,…
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Architecture Machine Group
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Research
New Media Medicine

How radical new collaborations will catalyze a revolution in health.
Project Research

Modeling Auditory Memory

When we form memories, not everything that we perceive is noticed; not everything that we notice is remembered. Humans are excellent at f…
How to build characters that have the everyday common sense, the ability to learn, and the sense of empathy that one finds in animals such a
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Digital Life
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Project Research

Relational AI

Creating long-term interpersonal interaction and shared experiences with social robots Many of our current projects explore the use of…
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Research
CE 2.0

CE 2.0
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Research
Advancing Wellbeing

Advancing Wellbeing
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Research
Music, Mind and Machine

How to build intelligent music systems out of interacting audio-processing agents.
Project Research

Digital Synesthesia

Digital Synesthesia looks to evolve the idea of human-computer interfacing and give way for human-world interacting. It aims to find a way …
Archived