This evening I attended an entertaining and inspiring presentation by Hiroshi Ishii, director of the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Professor Ishii's group works at the borders between atoms and bits, building devices and and conceptualizing techniques which allow people to interact with digital environments using their bodies in ways they're used to. He described this borderland using the metaphor of life in the inter-tidal zone — challenging but also rich and vital.

Some of the projects he described had the aim of creating a much richer ambient information environment for people to live or work in. Think of how much you can sense about an environment, say, your office, without even paying direct attention to it. At any moment you could probably give a fairly accurate picture of the weather outside, the time of day, how many colleagues are present, how busy they are, if the mood of the office is high-strung or light-hearted; all of this information is fed into our brains subconsciously by our peripheral senses. This is especially true in today's contemporary open plan, communal office environments where barriers and divisions are few.

Ishii has been working on building artifacts and interfaces which can draw intangible digital information out into the realm where our senses can grasp and make use of it. Pinwheels are one such type of "ambient fixture", that spin not due to the wind, but due to the flow of bits on a network, the volume of trades on NASDAQ, or any other information source you desire. Much is made of the "mood" of the markets, and while this measure is difficult to quantify in clear terms, it is certainly a real phenomenon which can spell boom or bust on any given day if you trade stock. I can envision more refined versions of the pinwheel concept being installed in wall street offices and the office's occupants over time building up perceptual intuition about what the read of the pinwheels means for their trading day. Think of what can trigger someone to say "looks like a storm's brewing": it doesn't need to be massive stormclouds looming on the horizon, it may be a barely colored sky, light that is just slightly too dim for the time of day and time of year, the body's physical guage of the degree of humidity, or a combination of a number of such minor factors aggregated together. When information is expressed tangibly we begin to be able to leverage millenia of evolutionary forces which have tuned our bodies and minds to the physical world around us. Furthermore, the associative learning paradigm of our bodies and minds means that we can detect patterns physically that are too complex or subtle for us to express verbally or analytically. In the same way that most people can easily learn to catch a fly ball despite being unable to calculate the physics involved in its trajectory, so too will we be able to detect surprisingly complicated information patterns once those bits are made tangible so that the full power of the body's exquisite machinery can be brought to bear on them.

Some of the work he presented was more poetic than revolutionary, but no less enjoyable. He described building a "weather bottle" for his aged mother, who never used a computer in her life. The empty glass bottle had a stopper which was discreetly sensored to react to opening and closing. When the stopper was pulled, a (hidden, unspecified) computing device pulled a live weather forecast for his mother's home in Japan off of the Internet. The bottle would then play the sound of falling raindrops if rain was in the forecast, or the sound of bird's chirping if the forecast was clear. What a simple, beautiful way to provide some of the benefits of modern computing and communication technologies to users without forcing them to become slaves to the device, "forcing them to boot into Windows 98 every morning" as Ishii said.

This weather bottle and his mother's subsequent passing inspired a whole series of innovative bottle prototypes, including the musicBottles project which creates a marvellous music customization environment by using each bottle to represent a different instrument in a jazz outfit or symphony orchestra. Also cool is PingPongPlus, a ping pong table augmented with under-table sensors and overhead video projection. The sensors locate where the ball lands each time, which is fed to a computer which renders outwardly-growing concentric circles, as if the impact of the ball was creating ripples on the surface of a pond. These images are projected down directly onto the playing surface in realtime. Watch the video on the page linked above, it's quite a sight!

Someone asked a question about virtual reality after the talk, and while I didn't hear Ishii's response, it prompted some thoughts of my own. The initiatives that fall under the rubric of "virtual reality" mean well, I think, in that they implicitly acknowledge the fact that we must leave behind a great many of the things we cherish about the "real world" as living, breathing human beings when we enter cyberspace, and that cyberspace would be better if it had more humanity and vitality. An important point, that is sometimes discounted by technophiles, but to me the solution to the sharp real/virtual dichotomy that computer users face is not to push the world into the computer, but to pull the computer out into the world.

I'd also like to discuss Ishii's smart, collaborative workbenches and some of the parallels between the type of design process he's envisioning and similar trends in software engineering, but those topics will have to wait for another day. For now I leave you with this thought: