Human society is thoroughly immersed in a vast network of communicated information, consisting of media artifacts and procedural structures. Our technologies have become mobile, our story-making fragmentary, our impressions of meaning dynamic. How can we benefit from these changes, while navigating and engaging with these novel aspects of the modern life? Media Fabrics research focuses on a new paradigm: a semi-intelligent organism where lines of communication, threads of meaning, chains of causality, and streams of consciousness converge and intertwine to form a rich tapestry of creative story potentials, meaningful real-time dialogues, social interactions, and personal or communal art and story-making. The media fabric paradigm shapes how we see media construction, exchange, performance, and reflection. It is characterized by six critical attributes: it is connected, integral to our everyday lives, improvisational, mindful, synergistic, and open to self-reflection. As information manipulation becomes something more complex and more personal - as if in "conversation with an audience" - participants dynamically transcend their roles as creators, editors, and audience, continuously weaving and navigating original paths within the media fabric.
http://ic.media.mit.edu/people/gid/research.html
I'm building a mindful camera for documentary videographers. The camera uses commonsense reasoning to provide feedback to the videographer during documentary construction. The mindful camera knows, for example, what might happen at typical events such as marathons, dinner parties and elections. It can make predictions and flag unusual events, prompting the videographer to develop multiple story threads for their documentary. This work strives to define a new method of documentary practice in which videographer and a mindful camera collaborate to explore unfolding storytelling possibilities as they observe and record the everyday world.
http://www.media.mit.edu/~barbara/research.html
i am developing technologies that explore how we can seamlessly and fluidly document our experiences and share them with others in an engaging and reflective manner. using rich-media weblogs, custom software for camera cellphones and mediated story thread displays, i am working on making the transition from raw experience to descriptive story a spontaneous, evolving and playful process.
Aisling Kelliher http://web.media.mit.edu/~aisling/research.html
Media Fabrics 01 Weblog
I look at the world from an object-centric perspective. I imagine that one-day objects we encounter in our environment will share a story with us based on its own experiences. What will the chair tell you the next time you sit on it? What will the walls tell you as you enter an empty room? What stories will the mirror tell? I am building an expressive framework where technology supports to enrich the provenance of objects as it relates to narrative, which I call Objects with Attitude.
Hyun-Yeul Lee http://www.media.mit.edu/~hyun/research/
Ali is in the process of building an integrated display and interaction platform called TViews. The platform takes the form of a table with an embedded flat-screen display, and sensing technology that can track the location of tagged objects that are placed on its surface. It is designed for collaborative and social exploration of multimedia applications in the home or classroom environment. It can support a variety of interactive applications, including spatial or multi-viewpoint storytelling systems, narrative simulation games, and media content browsing.
Ali Mazalek http://www.media.mit.edu/~mazalek/projects/tviews/
Paul is developing an improvisational paradigm for human-computer interaction. His goal is to make our interaction with computers improvisational.
His research includes:
- developing a model for creating, manipulating, and exhanging audio, video, and text improvisationally, utilizing genetic algorithms and semantic representations to make the computer capable of helping you in constructing & navigating rapidly changing media spaces.
- developing the Emonic Environment, a system that not only allows you to edit and browse media, but suggests you interesting paths through the media space, and allows you to use microphones, cameras, cell phones, and sensors to contribute to and control the experience in real time, in both group and solo contexts.
Paul Nemirovsky When not thinking about humans and machines, Paul makes music and sings beautiful hymns. Stay tuned, this boy is hot.