Cilia–the microscopic basic hair-like structure that covers all mammalian cells–has numerous functions. As a natural interface between a living organism and its environment, hair provides warmth and adhesion; it senses vibration and touch, and it’s responsive in terms of navigation and movement. Plus, hair has aesthetic properties.  more ›

Image Credit: 

Tangible Media group

Reality Editor is a new kind of tool to empower users to connect and manipulate the functionality of physical objects. Just point the camera of your smartphone at an object and its invisible capabilities will become visible for you to edit. Drag a virtual line from one object to another and create a new relationship between these objects. With this simplicity, you are able to master the entire scope of connected objects.

Press about Reality Editor:  more ›

Trying to take pictures in the dark or through a window is difficult for professional photographers and everyday people alike. A group of researchers at MIT have proposed a camera that can take a perfect picture, no matter what the lighting contrast is. Called a “modulo camera,” this camera is designed to never overexpose an image, enabling high dynamic range photography. This achievement was awarded the best paper runner-up at the 2015 International Conference on Computational Photography.  more ›

The goal of the Media Lab Digital Currency initiative is to bring together global experts in areas ranging from cryptography, to economics, to privacy, to distributed systems, to take on this important new area of research. The effort will reach across the MIT campus, and we look forward to including collaborations with leading experts around the world. The initiative will work with Lab researchers and faculty across the MIT campus to explore the many issues involved in blockchain and bitcoin technology.

Press about the Digital Currency Initiative:  more ›

NailO is a wearable input device in the form of a fingernail art sticker. It works as a miniaturized trackpad that can connect to your mobile devices; it also enables wearers to customize the device to fit the wearer’s personal style. NailO was created by Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao of the Living Mobile group and Artem Dementyev of the Responsive Environments group.

Press about NailO:
NailO turns your fingernail into a tiny trackpad (CNET)  more ›

In a new study published in Science, researchers from Ed Boyden's Synthetic Neurobiology group detail a new technique that allows them to use a polymer commonly found in diapers to physically enlarge brain tissue samples, enabling them to get high-resolution images of cellular activities. Learn more about how expansion microscopy works in this video, and explore the research and process in-depth at http://expansionmicroscopy.org/.  more ›

BioGlass:
What if you could see what calms you down or increases your stress as you go through your day? What if you could see clearly what is causing these changes for your child or another loved one? People could become better at accurately interpreting and communicating their feelings, and better at understanding the needs of those they love. This work explores the possibility of using sensors embedded in Google Glass, a head-mounted wearable device, to robustly measure physiological signals of the wearer.  more ›

Hugh Herr, head of the Lab's Biomechatronics research group, spoke at TED 2014 on March 19 about his group's work in creating bionic prosthetic limbs, and their goal to eliminate human disability through technology. To conclude his talk, he spoke about working with Boston Marathon bombing survivor Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a professional ballroom dancer who lost part of her leg in the attack. The group has spent the past 200 days developing a new prosthetic limb for Adrianne that would allow her to dance again.  more ›

Image Credit: 

James Duncan Davidson

Daniel Leithinger, Sean Follmer, Alex Olwal, Akimitsu Hogge, Hiroshi Ishii  more ›

Image Credit: 

Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab

Grad student Xiao Xiao (Tangible Media) recently presented a talk about interactive music, featuring a performance on her project MirrorFugue, at both TEDxBoston and the Aspen Ideas Festival.

View her performance at TEDxBoston

View her performance at Aspen Ideas Festival

The Slam Dunk competition at the NBA All Star game (Feb. 25 at 8pm Eastern on TNT) will feature the Media Lab's Slam Force basketball net, which measures the energy of a dunk.

Courtesy of Turner Sports

Image Credit: 

Turner Sports

MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom.

Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, one of the system’s developers, calls it the “ultimate” in slow motion: “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera,” he says.  more ›

Image Credit: 

M. Scott Brauer

Andreas Velten (L) and Ramesh Raskar with the experimental setup used to produce slow-motion video of light scattering through a bottle.

Professor Hiroshi Ishii's recent TEDxTokyo talk, "The Last Farewell."

Video | Slides | Essay | Photos

Congratulations to five groups with Media Lab members who have made it to the finals in The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

The projects include:

All Cows Eat Grass (Mihir Sarkar, Robin Bose, Sean Leow), an online platform for real-time private music lessons. The system connects music instructors and students using a low-latency audio and video link, provides motivational support to practice between lessons, and lowers the barrier to learn music.  more ›

Death and the Powers is a new opera by composer Tod Machover and developed at the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with the American Repertory Theater and Chicago Opera Theater. It is a one-act, full evening work that tells the story of Simon Powers, a successful and powerful businessman and inventor, who wants to go beyond the bounds of humanity. Reaching the end of his life, Powers faces the question of his legacy: “When I die, what remains? What will I leave behind? What can I control?  more ›

Death and the Powers: Evvy and the Chandelier

This project builds an open, social information window into the Media Lab using 30 touch-sensitive screens strategically placed throughout the Media Lab complex. The experience of using these screens is optimized for guests and visitors who collaboratively explore and uncover the people, ideas, and connections behind the research of the Lab. The system also makes suggestions about who to meet, where they may be, and what projects and people—represented as "charms"—one ought to collect, trade, and share.  more ›

Image Credit: 

Andy Ryan

Interactive touchscreens placed throughout the Media Lab complex create a richer experience for visitors.

Merry Miser is a mobile application that helps its users make better decisions about spending. The application uses the context provided by a user's location and financial history to provide personalized interventions when the user is near an opportunity to spend. The interventions, which are motivated by prior research in positive psychology, persuasive technology, and shopping psychology, consist of informational displays about context-relevant spending history, subjective assessments of past purchases, personal budgets, and savings goals.

Merry Miser provides interventions when a user is near an opportunity to spend. Locations and messages are personalized using information fr

SixthSense (also known as WUW: Wear Ur World) is a wearable, gestural interface that augments our physical world with digital information, and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. SixthSense uses a camera and a tiny projector in a pendant-like device to see what we see, and visually augment the surfaces or objects with which we interact. SixthSense projects information onto any surface—such as walls and other objects around us—and allows us to interact with the information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or with the object itself.

Image Credit: 

Sam Ogden

SixthSense frees information from its confines and integrates it with the physical world. With SixthSense, MIT Media Lab researcher Pranav M

TOFU is a project to explore new ways of robotic social expression by leveraging techniques that have been used in 2d animation for decades. Disney Animation Studios pioneered animation tools such as "squash and stretch" and "secondary motion" in the 50's. Such techniques have since been used widely by animators, but are not commonly used to design robots. TOFU, who is named after the squashing and stretching food product, can also squash and stretch. Clever use of compliant materials and elastic coupling, provide an actuation method that is vibrant yet robust.

The Chameleon Guitar—so named for its ability to mimic different instruments—is an electric guitar whose body has a separate central section that is removable. This inserted section, the soundboard, can be switched with one made of a different kind of wood, or with a different structural support system, or with one made of a different material altogether. Then, the sound generated by the electronic pickups on that board can be manipulated by a computer to produce the effect of a different size or shape of the resonating chamber.

Image Credit: 

Webb Chappell

Graduate student Amit Zoran and the "Chameleon Guitar."

Yes, it's cute as cute can be, but TOFU is more than just a bundle of fuzziness: it is an example of a new generation of robots that can display cartoon-like physical behaviors.

The rise in popularity of the Weblog, and the development of its many variants such as photoblogs, vlogs, moblogs, and tumblelogs, demonstrate that people are increasingly willing to share what they are doing, seeing, and thinking. Micro-blogging has opened this space up even further to those who would not at all consider themselves authors; services like twitter and the status updates common to social networking sites open up a form of publication that is well suited to this wide and fundamentally amateur audience.

Girls Involved in Real-Life Sharing (G.I.R.L.S.) allows users to reflect actively upon the emotions related to their situations through the construction of pictorial narratives. The system employs common-sense reasoning to infer affective content from the users' stories and support emotional reflection. Users of this new system are able to gain new knowledge and understanding about themselves and others through the exploration of authentic and personal experiences. Currently, the project is being turned into an online system for use by school counselors.