I had a great opportunity this week to visit my friends Ermal and Julie at the mediaLab. I got introduced to some leading technology researchers who were master students at the mediaLab finishing their final year.
Tangible Media Group by Felix Heibeck http://f3-h.de/#
Demo 1 Perfume made digital
The perfume bottles is an early work example of something physical made digital. When you release a cap, jazz music plays. each bottle cap you remove plays a different instrument that compliments the song, and the more caps you release the more vocal the sounds are.
http://youtu.be/Jk2qAPBz9n8
Demo 2 Feeling at a distance
Having two people placing their hands on each cylinder module and rolling them allows you to physically feel each other's movement at a real- time experience. You can even feel the capacity and the speed of the other user. The idea is that such simple demonstrations can express the possibilities of the physical being manipulated by the digital.
Demo 3 Tangible Sand for Digital Building
Physical manipulation is really easy, you dont need instructions. Using something physical to create something digital is easy, but to create something digital without the physical, in CAD let's say could take a very long time. This project is a one directional link, into the digital world. You have a handle on the digital content, but the digital content doesn't have a handle on the physical. Let's say you wanted to create a perfect sphere, it would be impossible. But here researchers are exploring how the digital can really create physical, and that's what they are currently investigating.
http://youtu.be/r47924dovyI
Demo 4 Bi-Directional Material
A exploration of material that can be manipulated bi-directionally. The kinect manipulates the surface of the material and moves based on physical manipulation. At the same time, you can control the material digitally through the computer. Felix said they are imagining this interface perhaps at a smaller scale, so that users can use it as a surface to manipulate pixels. The first prototype, is the one with the screen, published, the second is a smaller scale that will be given to the HP's display, and they are working on a third one. The larger scale project is used to imagine in an office space, where people can manipulate the physical. Just imagine each puzzle piece as a pixel, in a larger scale it can serve as a screen.
http://youtu.be/sztnVST8USQ
Savannah Niles- Part of Viral Spaces Media Group
"A data-driven interfaces to create, publish, and explore dynamic media for narrative entertainment and informative engagement with news. A multi platformed tool for a future in which everyone is a broadcaster. I also build media analysis frameworks for extracting multidimensional frame-by-frame metadata from news and visual media in real time"
Ultimate media allows users to be active and passive consumers of media through filtering content and organized through timelines, subjects, color, and emotions through sound. It uses a data framework created by the lab called Glue. A great way to to add filters to maximize time consumption of media by selected filters like, date, subject, channel, and content, similarly to opening multiple tabs at once and parsing out links that you would like to watch. You can also see how that topic is on a timeline so you can see how it has evolved over time and see the different perspectives.
Glue is a data framework. A digestive system for media, it watches 30 channels and downloads all these videos and it takes what we all look at and funnels them of raw data types, and say this is about emma Watson. Etc. celebrity news. It asks whats the content, and asks whats the emotional tone, are people yelling? It can split the video and watch segments of the scene. It does color historgram as well.
The challenge working with this project is finding insights about other cultures' consumption of media. Since most of the meta data is written in english, and most media is generated by western cultures, its only showing a singular interpretation of global news. When most importantly, discovering how non -western media is portrayed and shared would greatly help the researchers like the medialab facilitate untapped audiences.
http://youtu.be/eyy36UDQo1E
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