Information Ecology

We have a limited range of hearing, defined primarily by volume and distance. As one moves further away from a constant sound, it becomes quieter. What if it didn’t have to? Audiograph looks at how positional and orientation information can help us bridge distance barriers for audio, and create seamless audio interactions between individuals, places, and information. Applications include social interactions, serendipitous encounters, navigation, and a re-evaluation of phones and remote audio-based communication.

The BiDi Screen is an example of a new type of thin I/O device that possesses the ability to both capture images and display them. Scene depth can be derived from BiDi Screen imagery, allowing for 3-D gestural and 2-D multi-touch interfaces. This bidirectional screen extends the latest trend in LCD devices, which has seen the incorporation of photo-diodes into every display pixel. Using a novel optical masking technique developed at the Media Lab, the BiDi Screen can capture lightfield-like quantities, unlocking a wide array of applications from 3-D gesture and touch interaction with CE devices, to seamless video communication.

We all use systems for organizing our cluttered schedules, from the day planner, to to-do lists, to methods such as Getting Things Done. Daydar is a framework that makes this process social: Can you learn from the working styles of others? Can you collaboratively create an environment of healthy competition by being aware of your friends' daily accomplishments? Can this help you to find a better balance between work and play? Within this framework, we are experimenting with physical and digital artifacts that enable you to reflect on your own goals through your peers' work habits, get motivated, and externalize your tasks in order to improve the process of accomplishing projects.

Much of information visualization is done, as the name would imply, visually. While research has looked into haptic feedback to help humans “feel” their way through information or interfaces, very little research has looked at the ways that smell can provide us with information or lead to user actions, outside of a replication of familiar smells. InfoSmell looks at how we can use our sense of smell to notify, indicate, or even persuade users, introducing a limited language of unique smells associated with specific information such as email, blogs, or news.

If everyone says time is relative, why is it still so rigidly defined? There have been many attempts to address the issue of coordinating schedules, but each of these attempts runs into an issue of rigidity: in order to negotiate an event, a specific time must be designated in advance. This model is inherently poor at accommodating life's unpredictability. Kairoscope looks at time from a human perspective: allowing people to coordinate events socially and on the fly, without worrying about precision. This project evaluates the potential implications of a shared, malleable schedule, as well as the data inputs and user interactions necessary to create such a system.

Even the most open content system is only as transparent as its interface. Taking cues from the timeless activity of annotating the margins of books, Marginalia provides a visual overlay for analyzing Wikipedia articles. Employing a number of different visualizations, users can browse Wikipedia with a critical eye for who authored each section, how contentious an article or topic is, or the geographic diversity of the authors. Marginalia pulls back the curtains on the collaborative authorship process, and has broader applications in the critical reading of online works.

We provide a software and hardware toolkit for creating an on-body network of tactile and ambient information accessories, connecting people physically with information accessed via the Internet. My Ears Are Burning uses the toolkit to make a user aware of attention being paid to her online presence. Heating elements placed on the user's ears are activated when, for example, her Web page is accessed or she is tagged in a photograph on Facebook. The toolkit hardware consists of a Bluetooth module outfitted with simple-to-use I/O pins for connecting input sensors and output actuators. The software component resides on a cell phone that acts as a router between the Bluetooth modules and the Internet. This platform is also used for the Proverbial Wallets project.

Functionally, television content delivery has remained largely unchanged since the introduction of television networks. NeXtream explores an experience where the role of the corporate network is replaced by a social network. User interests, communities, and peers are leveraged to determine the television content, combining sequences of short videos to create a set of channels customized to each user. This project creates an interface to explore television socially, connecting a user with a community through content, with varying levels of interactivity: from passively consuming a series, to actively crafting one's own television and social experience.

We have trouble controlling our consumer impulses, and there's a gap between our decisions and the consequences. When we pull a product off the shelf, do we know our bank-account balance, or whether we're over budget for the month? Our existing senses are inadequate to warn us. The Proverbial Wallet fosters a financial sense at the point of purchase by embodying our electronically tracked assets. We provide tactile feedback reflecting account balances, spending goals, and transactions as a visceral aid to responsible decision making.

Would you know if a dear, but seldom seen, friend happened to be on the same train as you? The Proximeter is both an agent that tracks the past and future proximity of one’s social cloud, and an instrument that charts this in an ambient display. By reading existing calendar and social-network feeds of others, and abstracting these into a glanceable pattern of paths, we hope to nuture within users a social proprioception and nudge them toward more face-to-face interactions when opportunities arise.

Coordination of and communication between large numbers of individuals, especially in situations that are prone to change rapidly, requires a common output and a recognizable input. Shake4Action looks at how we can organize large groups by augmenting SMS, email, and phone calls with mobile gestures. This project builds a platform to receive information of varying types (such as keywords, touch tones, and gestures), and return information that can be re-interpreted on output by each participant.

The Internet supports many great tools for communicating at a distance in order to maintain personal relationships and build social networks. However, these tools rarely help us realize which relationships are strained by lack of attention. Social Garden explores using virtual plants as a metaphor for relationships, encouraging us to tend to our social connections as we do our gardens. By tracking and analyzing communications through email, instant messaging, social websites, SMS, and phone, Social Garden proposes to give feedback on how our relationships are flourishing or wilting, and organizes our social circles. We also explore the garden metaphor as a practical interface to browse and manage conversations and contacts.

The vast amounts of user-generated content on the Web often produce information overload as frequently as they provide enlightenment; Twitter Weather reduces large quantities of text into meaningful data by gauging the emotional content. Twitter Weather visualizes the prevailing mood about top Twitter topics by rendering a weather-report-style display. Supporting Twitter Weather is a user-trained Web service that aggregates and visualizes attitudes on a topic.

While computer data can live virtually anywhere, we are still faced with the mundane tasks of document management such as uploading, sharing, and syncing between locations. Window Wallet aims to remove the burden of managing your data across screens, computers, and devices by turning your portable device into a virtual wallet of data and software. This project looks at developing an interface that facilitates this process, acting on your mobile device as a virtual conduit between local data and data in the cloud. It allows you both to access and transfer documents independent of your physical location.