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The MIT Media Lab Goes Viral: 11 Projects Aimed at Changing the Way We Communicate

The MIT Media Lab is broken down into 26 different research groups. From “Macro Connections” to “Camera Culture,” each team is focused on an innovative end goal. Throughout this past year, one group, “Viral Spaces,” has focused on proximal networking, hoping to facilitate discourse between real people in real places. From Junkyard Jumbotron’s large digital displays to Peddl’s brand-new balanced marketplace, here’s a look at 11 of the projects aimed at changing the way we communicate.

Brin.gy — The open-source project allows people to announce bits of information about themselves and then find others based on that information. Utilizing “Human Discovery Protocol,” users can form dynamic groups of people with similar expertise, those interested in buying the same product, people in the same location, or a mixture of all three.

Geo.gy — Geo.gy is a location shortener service that uses HTML5 to detect your location and then provides you with a short URL to a pointer on a map. Through Geo.gy, users can add text to a post, tweet or SMS. Sure, Twitter allows for geolocation already, but when someone re-tweets your tweet, your location information is lost. Not with Geo.gy, however.

Ghosts of the Past — Curious to see what the past looked like from exactly where you’re standing? Ghosts of the Past allows users to create, save and geotag panoramic canopies. Anyone who visits the same space after you can then see what you’ve seen, joining with you to create, what the team calls, “time-lapsed socialization.” Using full-circle panoramas and an iPad 2, memories are overlaid on top of physical space.

Junkyard Jumbotron — Working with laptops, smartphones and tablets — anything that runs a web browser — Junkyard Jumbotron allows users to take several random displays and stitch them together into one large, virtual display, simply by taking a photograph of them.

Meld — By presenting your social graph as a moving picture, Meld breaks away from the text-centric social networks we use today, and offers a more holistic view instead. You can now visually explore your social life.

NewsFlash — NewsFlash is a collaborative way to experience news from around the world. It’s as simple as pointing your phone at a headline or photograph and then snapping a picture. What happens is, the data emanates from the screen and is captured by your cellphone camera, later allowing any number of people to see the article at once. Users can also take their scanned article on the go, so your NewsFlash history stays with you, even as you move away from the display.

Peddl – Both iPhone and web-enabled, Peddl has become one of the easiest ways to buy and sell things with the people around you. Using two key phrases — “I want [this], and it’s worth [that]” and “I have [this], and it’s worth [that]” — Peddl has created a balanced marketplace. Even better, using Peddl, sellers can instantly connect to buyers and are able to communicate directly through text or by phone without ever having to provide their telephone number or email address.

Recompose — Recompose is a new system for manipulation of an actuated surface. (Or, in less formal words, “So cool.” Just check out the video below.) By using the body as a tool for direct manipulation, alongside gestural input for functional manipulation, the team shows how a user can be given unprecedented control over an actuated surface.

Social Energy — Focused on the idea that most people don’t have a sense of how much their actions can affect a building’s energy use, the Social Energy team is testing the hypothesis that “if people have a convenient way to record their energy use and learn ways to improve it, they will change their habits.” They’ve created visualizations of HVAC use throughout the Media Lab, and have been allowing people to not only see a heat map of their lab area, but compare their energy usage to those in other areas throughout the Lab.

T+1 — T+1 is an application that allows groups to organize their interests and schedules. With T+1, users receive instructions and send their personal information through their mobile device at specific times. At each time step, T+1 gathers together users’ interests, opinions and locations to compute and optimize the structure and format of group interactions for the next interval. The team writes that they hope to deploy the platform in settings ripe with academic and political discussions to analyze how user opinions and interests evolve over time.

X-Ray Audio — Using X-Ray Audio, drivers can join voice chat rooms and hear the voices of other drivers around them. Users can move their listening position further up or back down the road with the use of voice commands, as well as up-vote any helpful drivers they encounter. By creating a voice conference attached to a locale, the team says they’re enabling people to continue the experience of a close-quarters discussion over any distance. Just watch the video below to see X-Ray Audio in use for yourself.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/03/25/the-mit-media-lab-goes-viral-11-projects-aimed...