Matti Gruener, a graduate student in the City Science research group, is interested in what people carried before they carried their phones — useful things that didn’t call attention to themselves with endless notifications and distractions. For his final project in Professor Neil Gershenfeld’s How to Make (Almost) Anything class, Greuner drew on his experience as a software engineer working in extended reality and the hardware skills he’d developed in the class to create “glyph,” a wallet with a small E Ink screen that can be used with XR glasses to navigate in the real world.

To test the device, he took it to a low-stress location — the airport — and used it to board a flight without his phone. Beyond the airport, Greuner is using glyph to receive journaling prompts; two buttons on the device allow him to accept or decline the prompt, letting him communicate with the system that produces them without taking out his phone. 

“Part of the ethos [at MIT],” he says, “is to, you know, not just do things that are academically interesting, but also take it into the wild and test it and see how it reacts to the world and how the world reacts to it.”