Massachusetts Institute of Technology

TEI, the conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction, is about HCI, design, interactive art, user experience, tools and technologies, with a strong focus on how computing can bridge atoms and bits into cohesive interactive systems.

Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension that turns your browser into a mashup platform, by allowing you to extract data from different web sites and mix them together. Piggy Bank also allows you to store this extracted information locally for you to search later and to exchange at need the collected information with others.

The following publications and interviews deal with the work of the SENSEable City Laboratory and its members, individually or in teams.

Greasemonkey alternative with integrated side-bar editor; Chickenfoot is a Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser's sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing. In Chickenfoot, scripts are written in a superset of Javascript that includes special functions specific to web tasks

In recent years, using technology to change the way people work has often meant painful disruption, as CIOs rolled enterprise software programs through the ranks of reluctant staffers. Today, employees are more likely to bring in new technologies on their own—and to do so enthusiastically—through their Web browser, whether it’s starting a blog, setting up a wiki to share knowledge, or collaborating on documents hosted online. Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been watching this shift closely. His new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, explores the ways that leading organizations are bringing Web 2.0 tools inside. McAfee calls these tools “emergent social software platforms”—highly visible environments with tools that evolve as people use them—and he is optimistic about their potential to improve the way we work.

The new bi-directional display being demoed performs both multitouch functions that we're familiar with and hand movement recognition in the space in front of the screen -- which we're also familiar with, but mostly from the movie. The gestural motion tracking is done via embedded optical sensors behind the display, which are allowed to see what you're doing by the LCD alternating rapidly between what it's displaying to the viewer and a pattern for the camera array. This differs from projects like Natal, which have the camera offset from the display and therefore cannot work at short distances