project name here

Information Ecology

We have become reliant on digital information for communication, commerce, and entertainment. This information needs to be always available, whether stored locally on our computers, on enterprise servers at work, or via third-party services like GMail. Most importantly, we should have choices beyond desktop computers or smartphones to access it.

The Information Ecology group explores ways to connect our physical environments with information resources. Through the use of low-cost, ubiquitous technologies, we are creating seamless and pervasive ways to interact with our information—and with each other. We focus on projects that harness the ecology of consumer electronics and sensor devices—present and future—to more smoothly mediate the boundaries between the physical and information worlds we inhabit.

Projects

Audiograph: Superhero Hearing
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.

ReeD Martin and Henry Holtzman [Project site]

BiDi Screen
The BiDi Screen is an example of a new type of I/O device that possesses the ability to both capture images and display them. 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 interaction with CE devices, to seamless video communication.

Henry Holtzman, Matt Hirsch and Ramesh Raskar [Project site]

Constant Crit
Constant Crit encourages Media Lab researchers to post their work in its earliest form, a concise one- to two-sentence statement. The system then displays these ideas throughout the Media Lab, offering others a chance to critique the work by suggesting readings and comments. It also offers a way for others to simply 'like' a project, or to go further and follow it or collaborate with the author.

Henry Holtzman and Greg Elliott [Project site]

Daydar: Framework for Socially Motivated Goal Fulfillment
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.

Henry Holtzman, John Kestner and Richard The [Project site]

Glasses-Free HD3DTV
For 3D displays to be successful, they must be bright enough to compete with 2D displays and not diminish display resolution in plane. To date, stacked-LCD displays have employed parallax barriers, which use pinhole or bar patterns to provide view-dependent imagery. We show a prototype that adapts the imagery on both layers to multi-view 3D content, increasing brightness while maintaining in-plane resolution. This promises a future of devices with sharp 2D screens and 3D displays with full horizontal and vertical parallax.

Ramesh Raskar, Henry Holtzman, Douglas Lanman, Matt Hirsch and Yunhee Kim [Project site]

Hands and Fingers: A Mobile Platform for Networked Objects
Our computing experiences are dominated by activities such as social networking and information retrieval, consuming and sharing bite-sized chunks of content with little thought. The exponentially expanding flood of information from the Internet and sensors embedded in our lives is too large and varied to be represented in traditional formats, especially as screens have only shrunk. Cell phones, already at the center of this lifestyle, are well-positioned to carry us closer to invisible, ubiquitous computing. Hands and Fingers is a toolkit for prototyping interactions among people and objects, using the cellphone as hub.

Henry Holtzman and John Kestner [Project site]

Home Fabratory
Using your personal fabratory, explore a world in which 3D printers cost as little as today's inkjets and are found in every home. We've developed several sub-$100 machines that demonstrate the practicality of this future, and greatly expand the range of items that can be created on your desktop. These new capabilities have far-reaching implications for personalization of products, direct-to-consumer production, and the creation of "information objects."

Henry Holtzman and David Carr [Project site]

InfoSmell: Smell Your Data
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.

ReeD Martin and Henry Holtzman [Project site]

Kairoscope: Social Time
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.

Henry Holtzman and ReeD Martin [Project site]

Konbit
Konbit is a service that helps communities rebuild themselves after a crisis by indexing the skillsets of local residents, allowing NGOs to find and employ them. Haitians, their diaspora, and the international community can volunteer their skills via phone, SMS, or Web. Skills can then be searched in real time and location by NGOs such as the American Red Cross and Partners-in-Health. Konbit is language and medium neutral, where Kreyol voice and text messages may be translated into other languages through the Konbit phone, text, or Web interface.

Greg Elliott, Aaron Zinman, Henry Holtzman and Pattie Maes [Project site]

NeXtream: Social Television
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.

Henry Holtzman, ReeD Martin, Ana Luisa Santos and Mike Shafran [Project site]

Proverbial Wallets
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.

Henry Holtzman, John Kestner, Daniel Leithinger, Danny Bankman, Emily Tow and Jaekyung Jung [Project site]

Proximeter: An ambient social navigation instrument
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.

Henry Holtzman and John Kestner [Project site]

Salvage
The Salvage Table is a reuse system that educates participants about electronic items left for recycling. The Salvage Table breaks down complex circuitry into core, reusable pieces and provides information on how to reuse them. While the table is a main feature of the current trial implementation, a core component is crowd-sourcing. Users can visit salvage.media.mit.edu, browse through the items that have been left at the Salvage Table, and add missing meta-information (e.g., components on the boards, ways to use the chips or components). A long-term goal is to influence company policy for manufacturing parts so that modularization and reuse are prioritized. Eventually, companies may even re-harvest parts from older models for use in other products or in research labs. Produce less, salvage more.

Henry Holtzman and Greg Elliott [Project site]

Social Garden
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.

Henry Holtzman and John Kestner [Project site]

Tableau
Remember when we made a connection by handing someone a photo? Now we fiddle with too many cables, menus, and communication channels, and those individual connections get drowned out. Can we return to physical experiences while retaining the collective intelligence of the network? Tableau is a nightstand that stores and retrieves memories. It may put friends' photo postcards in the drawer, or post mementos to your online scrapbook. This is an example of task-centric computing, where the interface is distributed across connected physical objects. Apps that run in the cloud can weave available objects into environmental I/O, giving users computing experiences that fit into the flow of life.

Henry Holtzman and John Kestner [Project site]

Takeover TV
Takeover TV heralds a new era of bar patronage where you and your like-minded friends are in charge of the screens. When you check in at a location, your likes and dislikes automatically influence what is being shown on local displays. If you want more control, start a vote to pick a new show using your beer glass—or your iPhone. Create season-premiere nights for your favorite shows, or work with friends to define the types of shows that play at your local bars. Sick of watching sports? Assemble enough fans of your favorite show at the local pub and take over the TV.

Henry Holtzman, David Carr and Greg Elliott

The Glass Infrastructure
This project builds an open, social information window into the Media Lab using 30 touch-sensitive screens strategically placed throughout both buildings in the complex. The experience of using them is optimized for guests and visitors to 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 project and people information—represented as "charms"—one ought to collect, trade, and share. This is a model for an open IT system that can be used anywhere; it is a framework for developing open-area and personally responsive access methods.

Henry Holtzman, Andrew Lippman, David Small, Greg Elliott, Jon Ferguson, Boris Kizelshteyn, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos, Chaki Ng and Rick Borovoy [Project site]

Twitter Weather
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.

Henry Holtzman, John Kestner and Stephanie Bian [Project site]

Archive

InfoField
InfoField aims to seamlessly connect physical space with the ubiquitous network, helping users select information in a dense RFID-tagged environment. The system uses a wearable RFID reader that monitors every tag within range (~1.5m), and sensor-embedded RFID tags which provide orientation, light level, and proximity data along with their identification codes. InfoField derives the user’s interactions with the corresponding host object from the sensor data and enables browsing, logging, and selecting of the physical object’s data. This system, fully compatible with EPC protocol, expands the RFID application area, including location tracking, inventory monitoring, activity logging, physical manipulation of data, and recommender systems.

Henry Holtzman

Marginalia: Critical Lenses for Reading Wikipedia
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.

Henry Holtzman, David Small, John Kestner and Jeffrey Warren [Project site]

Metazine
The goal of the Metazine is to provide a jumping-off point for research into the magazine of the future. We have developed an application for Internet tablets to supplement and enhance the content of paper magazines with digital content in a way that preserves the flexibility and robustness of the tried-and-true paper format. The Metazine follows coded links placed near articles and advertisements in a magazine to seamlessly deliver digital video or images on demand.

Henry Holtzman and Matt Hirsch [Project site]

My Ears Are Burning
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 acting as a router between the Bluetooth modules and the internet. This platform is also used for the Proverbial Wallets project.

Henry Holtzman, John Kestner and Danny Bankman [Project site]

OPEN I/O
OPEN I/O provides a hardware base and a suite of network services for the development of I/O devices. With OPEN I/O, we aspire to make the creation of Ethernet-enabled devices accessible to artists and software engineers. OPEN I/O devices are automatically discovered by the OPEN I/O service and assigned to users who control the devices. Using the OPEN I/O router, devices can communicate with each other, or with network-based applications and computation, such as provided by OPENSTUDIO and OPENCODE. Users can configure and program their hardware remotely, and interact with similar hardware devices around the world. OPEN I/O provides common device libraries to help bridge the gap between software and hardware development.

Henry Holtzman [Project site]

OPENSPACE
For new members of a work community, it can be difficult to learn the social landscape of the organization. Where are the casual meeting areas? When are people likely to be socially active? Are there spontaneous gatherings happening in parts of the workspace? OPENSPACE enables awareness of presence and activity by combining a grid of motion sensors with data logging, pattern analysis, and a variety of visualization techniques. With OPENSPACE, we aim to increase the social awareness of the larger spaces in which we work.
OPENTAG
OPENTAG is an RFID development platform for advancing ubiquitous electronic tagging of items and people. With OPENTAG, we break through the barrier of application-specific and proprietary RFID product engineering by developing our own tag and associated firmware. An OPENTAG can adapt to varying demands as a tagged item moves through its life cycle from manufacturing to supply-chain to retail to consumer to disposal. OPENTAG is security conscious and privacy friendly. [Project site]
Space Saver
Space Saver is a system for importing physical spaces into virtual environments. The project provides tools that lower the complexity barrier to representing our physical spaces in a virtual world, in turn adding new levels of relevance to virtual representations. The system operates by amassing readings from a distance-sensing camera into models that can be imported into Second Life and other 3-D modeling software. [Project site]
Television Meets Facebook: Social Networking via Consumer Electronics
This project explores how merging ubiquitous consumer electronics and the sociable Web can improve the user experience of these devices, increase the functionality of both, and help distribute content in a more sociable way. Through custom software for digital video recorders and a Facebook application acting as a hub, we connect a community of television viewers via their televisions. By connecting these two technologies, the user can now see what her friends think of the shows available on her DVR, and automatically record her friends' favorites; in return, the user contributes her own viewing data back to the social network.
Pinkie
Pinkie is a network based electronics prototyping board developed as a precursor to building large networked systems around physical devices. It has been designed to easily compose sensors and actuators that reside in different locations. Pinkie boards work in-relation with a suite of collaboration-oriented software services and interfaces to program and run distributed physical media, and to exchange data and functionality of devices over the Internet. Pinkies are inherently invisible, they hide behind the structures and only serve as facilitators to interface the physical world to the digital network.
Shake4Action: Gestural Mobile Coordination
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.

ReeD Martin and Henry Holtzman [Project site]

Window Wallet
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, allowing you to both access and transfer documents independently of your physical location.

Henry Holtzman and ReeD Martin [Project site]

Papers

People

Primary Investigator

Research Assistants

Alumni

Contact

Sandy Sener
617.253.6210
sansen(at)media.mit.edu