Archived TV programs evoke earlier times. This application combines a video and music archive with an immersive screen and a simple user interface suitable for everyone, from children to the elderly, to create a "Time Machine" effect. The only key for exploring is the user's age. People can enjoy over 1,300 TV programs from the last seven decades without having to do tedious text searches. This catalogue intuitively guides the user with an image array (64 different videos on one screen at the same time) that simplifies navigation and makes it immediate, rather than referencing it to previous screens.

BigBarChart is an immersive, 3D bar chart that provides a new physical way for people to interact with data. It takes data beyond visualizations to map out a new area--data experiences--that are multisensory, embodied, and aesthetic interactions. BigBarChart is made up of a number of bars that extend up to 10 feet to create an immersive experience. Bars change height and color in response to interactions that are direct (a person entering the room), tangible (pushing down on a bar to get meta information), or digital (controlling bars and performing statistical analyses through a tablet). BigBarChart helps both scientists and the general public understand information from a new perspective. Early prototypes are available.

Calliope is the follow-up to the NeverEnding Drawing Machine. A portable, paper-based platform for interactive story making, it allows physical editing of shared digital media at a distance. The system is composed of a network of creation stations that seamlessly blend analog and digital media. Calliope documents and displays the creative process with no need to interact directly with a computer. By using human-readable tags and allowing any object to be used as material for creation, it offers opportunities for cross-cultural and cross-generational collaboration among peers with expertise in different media.

This project steps beyond data visualizations to create data experiences. It aims to engage not only the analytic mind, but also the artistic and emotional self. In this project, chemicals found in people's bodies and homes are turned into a series of fashions. Quantities, properties, and sources of chemicals are represented through various parameters of the fashion, such as fabric color, textures, and sizes. Wearing these outfits allows people to live the data–to experience tangibly the findings from their homes and bodies. This is the first project in a series of works that seek to create aesthetic data experiences that prompt researchers and laypeople to engage with information in new ways.

The design process is no longer limited to one group of individuals, as number, level, and cost make tools ever more accessible. As we move towards tools that allow us to create our own materials, having a set of rules with which to evaluate, interpret, and design them will become increasingly important. One way of approaching this problem is by unpacking the ways in which materials create meaning. This project explores the more emotive aspects of materials, such as haptic responses to, cognitive evaluation of, and emotive perception of materials to understand how materials communicate meaning.The development of an effective methodology aims to lower the barriers of fabrication of engaging objects. By incorporating qualities that were not previously quantifiable, we aim to encourage a more interactive design process that allows for the production of experiences tailored to individual preference, and a framework for conversations around material issues.

Following upon work begun in the Graspables project, we are exploring what happens when a wide range of everyday consumer products can sense, interpret into human terms (using pattern recognition methods), and retain memories, such that users can construct a narrative with the aid of the recollections of the "diaries" of their sporting equipment, luggage, furniture, toys, and other items with which they interact.

We are developing inexpensive, efficient, high-bandwidth light modulators based on lithium niobate guided-wave technology. These full-color modulators support hundreds of thousands of pixels per scan line, making them suitable for fixed or wearable holographic displays.

ListenTree is an audio-haptic display embedded in the natural environment. Visitors to our installation notice a faint sound emerging from a tree. By resting their heads against the tree, they are able to hear sound through bone conduction. To create this effect, an audio exciter transducer is weatherproofed and attached to the tree's roots, transforming it into a living speaker, channeling audio through its branches, and providing vibrotactile feedback. In one deployment, we used ListenTree to display live sound from an outdoor ecological monitoring sensor network, bringing a faraway wetland into the urban landscape. Our intervention is motivated by a need for forms of display that fade into the background, inviting attention rather than requiring it. We consume most digital information through devices that alienate us from our surroundings; ListenTree points to a future where digital information might become enmeshed in material.

Narratarium augments printed and oral stories and creative play by projecting immersive images and sounds. We are using natural language processing to listen to and understand stories being told, and analysis tools to recognize activity among sensor-equipped objects such as toys, then thematically augmenting the environment using video and sound. New work addresses the creation and representation of audiovisual content for immersive story experiences and the association of such content with viewer context.

Pillow-Talk is the first of a series of objects designed to aid creative endeavors through the unobtrusive acquisition of unconscious, self-generated content to permit reflexive self-knowledge. Composed of a seamless recording device embedded in a pillow, and a playback and visualization system in a jar, Pillow-Talk crystallizes that which we normally forget. This allows users to capture their dreams in a less mediated way, aiding recollection by priming the experience and providing no distraction for recall and capture through embodied interaction.

We are creating consumer-grade appliances and authoring methodologies that will allow hallucinatory phenomena to be programmed and utilized for information display and narrative storytelling.

A basketball net incorporates segments of conductive fiber whose resistance changes with degree of stretch. By measuring this resistance over time, hardware associated with this net can calculate force and speed of a basketball traveling through the net. Applications include training, toys that indicate the force and speed on a display, dunk competitions, and augmented-reality effects on television broadcasts. This net is far less expensive and more robust than other approaches to measuring data about the ball (e.g., photosensors or ultrasonic sensors) and the only physical change required for the hoop or backboard is electrical connections to the net. Another application of the material is a flat net that can measure velocity of a ball hit or pitched into it (as in baseball or tennis); it can measure position as well (e.g., for determining whether a practice baseball pitch would have been a strike).

Adding augmented reality to the living-room TV, we are exploring the technical and creative implications of using a mobile phone or tablet (and possibly also dedicated devices like toys) as a controllable "second screen" for enhancing television viewing. Thus, a viewer could use the phone to look beyond the edges of the television to see the audience for a studio-based program, to pan around a sporting event, to take snapshots for a scavenger hunt, or to simulate binoculars to zoom in on a part of the scene. Recent developments include the creation of a mobile device app for Apple products and user studies involving several genres of broadcast television programming.