Inventing Interactive
Muriel Cooper (1925-1994) was my advisor when I was a graduate student at her Visible Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab. It was an experience that profoundly influenced the way I work and approach the the world. It’s not easy to describe, so instead these these quotes of hers may start to give a sense […]
This past weekend I went to see Sleep No More. The show, which takes place in New York’s “McKittrick Hotel” is an immersive theater experience. The audience, wearing masks, explores a hundred rooms spread over seven floors — you open drawers, examine props, follow actors around, and generally try to figure out what’s going on. […]
There’s something a little amazing that happens every time you set up a video projector. All the cables get connected, you turn the projector on, and during the process of placing it, the image may show up on an unexpected surface. It’s cool, so you move the projector around to see what it looks like […]
There’s been a lot of Kinect-based experimentation lately, and, like so much of it, this new research project from the MIT Media Lab looks pretty cool. But it’s more than just another Kinect-hack — it’s full of intriguing ideas of how video-conferencing can adapt if it’s more than just a “dumb” carrier of video. It […]
In February 2009, David Merrill gave a TED demo of Siftables – a project he was working on at the MIT Media Lab along with Jeevan Kalanithi and Pattie Maes. He described Siftables as “an interactive computer the size of a cookie.” But it’s not just a cute phrase, for it also communicates the approachability […]
Today, the MIT Media Lab starts its big 25th anniversary bash. And I’m sad that I’m missing the event. But the next best thing to being there is reminiscing, right? Twenty years ago, when I was a student there, the Lab was celebrating its 5th anniversary. As part of the schwag for the party, the […]
All of John Maeda‘s work is amazing and inspiring, but I find his series of Reactive Books to be among the most engaging and thought-provoking. Created between 1994 and 1999, each book explored the use of a different input: microphone, mouse, time, keyboard, and video. At a time when interactive media was trying to be […]
How adorable is this… with Drawdio you can turn almost anything into a musical instrument. (Unlike most posts on this blog, this isn’t screen-based — but creating interactive drawings in addition to designing interactivity with physical objects seems pretty cool.) Developed by Jay Silver at the MIT Media Lab (I promise to try and stop […]
It looks like we’re one step closer to the Luminous Room. Take a look at this demo of LiminAR. It’s a project by Natan Linder, a student of Pattie Maes in her Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab. LiminAR is made up of two components, the Bulb and the Lamp: The LuminAR Bulb […]
TED.com just posted a talk from this year’s TED2010 by John Underkoffler on his research into gesture interfaces. John is best known for his work on the interfaces in the film Minority Report but has since founded Oblong Industries. The talk demonstrates Oblong’s point-and-touch interface called g-speak. I have to admit, having never actually used the […]
Small Design Firm‘s recent Pledge Wall for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a beautiful interactive installation with a unique pen interaction. David Small, the firm’s founder, is a friend back from when we were both students at the MIT Media Lab. I’m a little jealous, as his firm has gone on to create some remarkable […]
Check out this recent interview with Nicholas Negroponte on The Engadget Show. A little background: Nicholas founded the Architecture Machine Group (or ArcMac) at MIT in 1967. His aim, partly inspired by Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad was to create an “architecture machine” — an active partner to help architects design buildings. The group also was responsible […]
I don’t remember when, or where, I first saw the Aspen Movie Map, but I do remember thinking that it was really cool — representing a new digital media world that I wanted to get involved with. Created in the late 1970’s, the Aspen Movie Map was a groundbreaking interactive virtual tour of the real-world […]
When I first saw Peter Greenaway’s film “Prospero’s Books” I was drawn to the innovative use of layering and multiple images to visualize the 24 books that made up the film’s arc. I was inspired. I wanted to explore ways to create interactive books with the richness and complexity as the books in the film… […]
In 1994 Muriel Cooper presented work at the TED5 conference in Monterey, CA that changed the way designers thought of the possibilities of electronic media. The work, from her group at the MIT Media Lab‘s Visible Language Workshop (or VLW), took typography, literally, into three dimensions — and gave it dynamics and interactivity that had […]