Blossom

Blossom is a multiperson awareness system that uses ioMaterials-based techniques to connect distant friends and family. It provides an awareness medium that does not rely on the attention- and reciprocity-demanding interfaces that are provided by digital communication media such as mobile phones, SMS and email. Combining touch-based input with visual, haptic, and motile feedback, Blossoms are created as pairs that can communicate over the network, echoing the conditions of each other and forming an implicit, always-there link that physically express awareness, while retaining the instantaneous capabilities that define digital communication.

Compact Contract: Commitments Made Easier

We all make promises to ourselves: lose 10 pounds, save more, exercise more. And yet, it is far too easy to make such promises and then find a thousand excuses to break them. Drawing on the fact that we are much less likely to make a social promise and then break it, Compact Contract is a tool for making small "contracts" with our friends and family, with a built-in reminder of the time period within which we have promised to act.

Done: Reflective Personal Project Management

Project management is often an art. But in an objective way, it is also about memory. We often know exactly how to get our work done, and in a single sitting we can map out the process and steps. However, and time goes on, we often lost track of this, and thus retrace and reinvent what we had already decided. "Done" is a chat-based ReflectOn for allowing a person to reflect on this initial process and map their instantaneous actions to their long terms goals. By connecting these domains of though, "Done" helps the user get more done, while gaining a deeper insight into the process inherent to their work.

Engaze

Since time immemorial, we have judged the character of people using their external characteristics: their clothing, hairstyle, makeup, accent, and so on. With the advent of digital technology, an increasingly detailed image of our identities is now available online. In short, today we represent ourselves both physically and digitally in the world. As yes, these worlds are fairly disjointed, and our representations are likewise disconnected from each other. Just as we choose to dress more or less formally in the real world, we choose to present ourselves online through our metadata in various ways, depending on the perceived audience. However, as technology continues its inexorable progress, these two worlds are collapsing towards convergence. With Engaze, we are attempting to engage the problem of bringing together these two currently disparate representations of a person into convergence in the physical world, and to explore some of the consequences resulting from the encroachment of our virtual representations into the physical world.

Flexible Urban Displays

This project explores how programmable surfaces can be shaped and textured in more flexible ways than traditional LED displays. By using modular tiles as building blocks, displays can become an integral part of objects, structures and spaces.

Influence

Influence is an interactive artwork visualizing how collective behavior emerges from decentralized interaction in a small social network. Individual people are affected by the behavior of people around them, and as a result, they influence the people around them as well.

We are all unique individuals. There are no two people alike. Nevertheless, other people around us affect our behaviors, thoughts and emotions in the most simple and unconscious ways. This interactive video piece presents 16 people as black and white “moving portraits”. Each portrait has a set of gestures, such as looking to the right, looking to the left, yawning, falling a sleep etc.

Each portrait has a predefined threshold level for “catching the yawn virus” from a neighbor portrait. The viewer interacts with the portraits by selecting the first portrait that will yawn. The first yawn starts a unique chain reaction of yawning, based on the predefined threshold levels and some randomness. A cycle ends when the “yawn virus” has finished spreading. Portraits that yawned “fall asleep”. A cycle might end with some portraits unaffected just as people resist influence in real life. At each cycle, the yawn spreads among the portraits at different patterns and rates.

ioMaterials

ioMaterials is an umbrella project encompassing a variety of collocated sensing-actuation platforms looking at various aspects of dense sensing for humane communication, memory, and remote awareness. Using dense collocated sensing actuation and sensing, we can change common objects into an interface capable of hiding unobtrusively in plain sight. Relational Pillow and TextureWall are instantiations of this ideal.

JotWatch: Instant Personal Note-Taking

JotWatch is a device designed with the singular purpose of easing quick note taking on the go. As our days fill with the deluge of microtasks and information fragments that modern life entails, every one of us has had occasions when we wanted to take a quick note, or remember something, or jot down a moment of inspiration. Yet, the task of digitally recording this thought faces enough steps, waits, and changes of context scatter fleeting thoughts and discourage note-taking. The JotWatch is a simple device in a wristwatch form factor that attacks this problem with always-on, fast note-taking ability along with navigation features that allow users to make the most of limited physical real estate.

Midas: Touched-based Personalization

Midas is a touch-based personalization system in development. It is designed to interact with ubiquitous ioMaterials interfaces in the objects and environment surrounding us in order to achieve seamless access to information via owner-less displays and surfaces that modify themselves to the needs to the users on the fly and on contact.

Portrait of Cati II

Portrait of Cati 2 is an homage to the project "Portrait of Cati" done by Stefan Agamanolis. This portrait reacts differently to a man or a woman. While reacting to a woman in a more natural way, Cati's image is more of woman's icon as a reaction to a man.

ReachMedia

ReachMedia is a system that supports on-the-move interaction with every day objects. The system is built around a wireless wristband with an RFID reader and accelerometers. The wristband detects physical objects that the user is interacting with, and retrieves relevant and personalized information via a smart phone. The user can then have a hands and eyes free interaction with the application by using a unique combination of slight gestural input and audio output.

ReflectOns: Mental Prostheses for Self-Reflection

ReflectOns are objects that help people think about their actions and change their behavior based on subtle, ambient nudges delivered at the moment of action. Certain tasks such as figuring out number of calories consumed, or amount spent eating out, are generally far more difficult for the human mind to grapple with. By using in-place sensing combined with gentle feedback and understanding of an individual's goals, we can recognize behaviors and trends and provide a reflection of their own actions that is tailored to enable better understanding of repercussion of actions, and change their behaviors to better match their own goals.

Relational Pillow

With the Relational Pillow project, we are trying to provide a simple, intimate, and personable communication medium between loved ones. The pillows are capable of sensing touch information, and displaying incoming touch data as a pattern of lights that show the outline "drawn" upon the remote pillow. Pillows can connect to each other over the network so that this sense of touch can be shared across long distances. The physical sensation of holding a pillow and interacting with it builds upon the idea of using the natural features of the object in order to achieve a deeper connection between the users, without interfering in the communication process itself.

SpendTrend: Reflecting on Spending Habits

SpendTrend is a ReflectOn designed to allow its user to reflect on spending habits. Often we spend based on the momentary buying capability, without considering the long-term outcomes. Most would not think twice about a Starbucks latte, but over a year this amount becomes non-trivial. Likewise, we often fail to think about savings in the long term. By making trends visible at the moment of purchase, SpendTrend attempts to make users mindful of their behavior and long-term goals. SpendTrend is built into a credit card, and has embedded processing and communication. The SpendTrend reader informs the card of the details of the purchases. With accurate, fine-grained information about purchases, the card then computes and display feedback, while also acting as a collection device for receipt data. The card harvests power directly from the reader, and has no explicit charging needs.

Spotlight

Spotlight is an installation of 16 interactive portraits. Each portrait has a set of 9 "temporal gestures" - photographic-quality sequences of human gestures such as "looking up". The portraits are networked, and placed in a 4X4 layout.

Every few seconds, a randomly selected portrait is looking towards a neighboring portrait. In turn, the neighboring portrait will look back. To a viewer of the installation, these "random discussions" create a sense of "social dynamics". The viewer can interrupt the group dynamics at any time, by selecting one of the 16 portraits. The remaining 15 portraits automatically react and direct their attention to the viewer-selected portrait, which reacts with a special gesture - "being the center of attention".

Spotlight is about an artist's ability to create a new meaning using the combination of interactive portraits and diptych or polyptych layouts. The mere placement of two or more portraits near each other is a known technique to create a new meaning in the viewer's mind. Spotlight takes this concept into the interactive domain, creating interactive portraits that are aware of each other's state and gesture. So not only the visual layout, but also the interaction with others creates a new meaning for the viewer. Using a combination of interaction techniques, Spotlight engages the viewer at two levels. At the group level, the viewer influences the portraits "social dynamics". At the individual level, a portrait's "temporal gestures" expose much about the subject's personality.

subTextile

subTextile is a toolkit for behavioral textiles: the intersection of on-body computation and electronic textiles focusing on the interactive capability of electronic textiles. It provides a powerful visual programming language and hardware platform specifically designed to create complete behavioral textile systems. Using a rich, goal-oriented interface, subTextile makes it possible for technical novices to explore electronic textiles, while providing open-ended expandability to experts. As e-textiles mature, better tools and techniques are needed by artists and designers experimenting with these new materials. The subTextile project was created to support cross-pollination between technical and design disciplines in the hopes of fostering greater creativity and depth within the field.

Transitive Materials

Transitive Materials is an umbrella project encompassing novel materials, fabrication technologies, and traditional craft techniques which can operate in unison to create objects and spaces that realize truly omnipresent interactivity. We are developing interactive textiles, ubiquitous displays, and responsive spaces that seamlessly couple input, output, processing, communication, and power distribution, while preserving the uniqueness and emotional value of physical materials and traditional craft. Life in a Comic, Physical Heart in a Virtual Body, Augmented Pillows, Flexible Urban Display, Shutters, Sprout I/O, and Pulp-Based Computing are current instantiations of these technologies.

For more information, please visit: Transitive Materials.

xLink

xLink is a system for managing context information and marshalling service queries and data flow. The repeated re-invention of context management systems remains a perennial phenomenon in context aware and ubiquitous computing. Often, these systems are integrated into applications to accommodate the low level requirements of the underlying devices. We hope to address this issue by providing a framework that allows a clean, API-based separation of device, context, and service management functionalities without curtailing the capabilities of any segment. xLink is designed to allow commodity ubiquitous computing devices, particularly devices with highly constrained computational capabilities, to interface directly at a low level to the context management framework, while still providing a clean and versatile service Application Programming Interface (API) that allows applications maximum expressive freedom. .