News Spotlights
Merry Miser
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.
Bokode: The Better Barcode
The ubiquitous barcodes found on product packaging provide information to the scanner at the checkout counter, but that's about all they do. Now, researchers at the Media Lab have come up with a new kind of very tiny barcode that could provide a variety of useful information to shoppers as they scan the shelves—and could even lead to new devices for classroom presentations, business meetings, videogames or motion-capture systems.
The tiny labels are just 3 millimeters across—about the size of the @ symbol on a typical computer keyboard. Yet they can contain far more information than an ordinary barcode: thousands of bits. Currently they require a lens and a built-in LED light source, but future versions could be made reflective, similar to the holographic images now frequently found on credit cards, which would be much cheaper and more unobtrusive.
One of the advantages of the new labels is that unlike today's barcodes, they can be "read" from a distance—up to a few meters away. In addition, unlike the laser scanners required to read today's labels, these can be read using any standard digital camera, such as those now built in to about a billion cellphones around the world.
Read the full article: "Barcodes for the rest of us"
MIT News | July 24, 2009
Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the "Sixth Sense," Game-Changing Wearable Tech
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.
SixthSense: A Wearable, Gestural Interface to Augment Our World
SixthSense 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 brings intangible, digital information into the tangible world, and allows us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. SixthSense frees information from its confines, seamlessly integrating it with reality, thus making the entire world your computer.
The SixthSense prototype comprises a pocket projector, mirror, and camera worn in a pendant-like mobile device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to a mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The system projects information onto the surfaces and physical objects around us, making any surface into a digital interface; the camera recognizes and tracks both the user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision-based techniques. SixthSense uses simple computer-vision techniques to process the video-stream data captured by the camera and follows the locations of colored markers on the user’s fingertips (which are used for visual tracking). In addition, the software interprets the data into gestures to use for interacting with the projected application interfaces.
The current SixthSense prototype supports several types of gesture-based interactions, demonstrating the usefulness, viability, and flexibility of the system. The current prototype system costs approximately $350 to build.
Meet TOFU: A Squash and Stretch Robot
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. Instead of using eyes actuated by motors, TOFU uses inexpensive OLED displays, which offer highly dynamic and lifelike motion.
Chameleon Guitar
In this research we implement a special guitar that combines physical acoustic properties with virtual capabilities. A wooden resonator - a unique, replaceable piece of wood that gives the guitar a unique acoustic sound, will embody the acoustical values. The acoustic signal created by this wooden heart will be digitally processed in a virtual sound box in order to create flexible sound design.
Today’s tools and instruments, whether musical or graphical, fall into two very distinct classes, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Traditional physical instruments offer a richness and uniqueness of qualities that result from the unique properties of the physical materials used to make them. The hand crafted, construction qualities are also very important for those tools. In contrast electronic and computer based instruments lack this richness and uniqueness; they produce very predictable and generic results, but offer the advantage of flexibility: they can be many instruments in one. We propose a new approach to designing and building instruments, which attempts to combine the best of both. The approach is characterized by a sampling of the instrument's physical matter and its properties and complemented by a physically simulated, virtual shape. This approach to building digital objects maintains some of the rich qualities and variation found in real instruments (the result of natural materials combined with craft) with the flexibility and open-endedness of digital ones.
'Chameleon Guitar' Blends Old-World and High-Tech
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.
Sandy Pentland Discusses His New Book at Google
Alex (Sandy) Pentland gives an overview of the work discussed in his new book, Honest Signals
Meet (and Watch) TOFU
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.
Meet TOFU, A Squash and Stretch Robot
TOFU is a project to explore new ways of robotic social expression by leveraging techniques that have been used in 2-D animation for decades. Disney Animation Studios pioneered animation tools such as "squash and stretch" and "secondary motion" in the 50s. 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. Instead of using eyes actuated by motors, TOFU uses inexpensive OLED displays, which offer highly dynamic and lifelike motion. TOFU is the project of Ryan Wistort, a master's student in the Personal Robots group.
Mycrocosm
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. Mycrocosm is a Web service that uses the visual language of statistics to share even smaller chunks of personal information—individual numbers and words that are full of meaning in our lives—and allows users to track a wide variety of the minutiae of their daily lives to build up a rich online picture of the tiny things they find meaningful.
Quickies
‘Quickies’ brings one of the most useful inventions of the twentieth century—the ubiquitous sticky note—into the digital age. Sticky (aka Post-it) notes help us manage our to-do lists and capture short reminders and information needed in the near future, but keeping track of them can be a task in and of itself. Quickies enrich Post-it notes, making them trackable and manageable; we give these stickies intelligence and the ability to remind us at the relevant time about the task we ought to perform. RFID and ink-recognition technologies can make it possible to create intelligent sticky notes that are searchable, send reminders and messages, and, more broadly, help us to connect seamlessly our physical and informational experiences.
GIRLS Involved in Real-Life Sharing
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.
Recent Lab Headlines
Here's a little collection of some recent Media Lab mentions in the news:
- "Revelations from the Mouth of a Babe": Human Speechome Project in the Boston Globe
- "Symposium Addresses Tech Issues": a Variety magazine follow up to Friday's Media Fabrics for Media Makers event
- Alyssa Wright's "Hero Reports" on John Hockenberry's "The Takeaway" on WNYC
- Hiroshi Ishii, CHI 2008: "Renaissance" panel recap
- "Military Inventions Hit the Civilian Market"—Hugh Herr in the Christian Science Monitor
Kudos for LabCAST
Congratulations to Paula Aguilera, Jonathan Williams, and Henry Holtzman—the LabCAST team—on their Webby award for Technology in the Online Film & Video category. LabCAST was also nominated for best Documentary Series in Online Film & Video, and is a Webby Honoree for Websites in the Podcast category. On June 9, Paula and Jonathan traveled to New York City to the Webby Awards ceremony.