CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
Weather vanes seem so last century. Today's newest weather devices can get their information wirelessly from the Internet.
Consider the illuminated "Beacon," a glowing box
that changes color based on conditions forecast for your city. Or its
youngest sibling, a "Wireless Weather Forecaster" the size of an alarm
clock that displays cartoonish clouds, suns or raindrops to convey your
five-day forecast. This $80 electronic forecaster is due to arrive in
stores next week.
Jason Alonso, a technical assistant in the MIT Media Laboratory, shows
the Sandscape system. Designed for urban planning, it relies on a
special "sensetable" equipped with an infrared camera to permit 3D
computer modeling of landscapes.
(Leslie Walker - The Washington Post)
|
|
Both receive free
updates constantly via a nationwide pager network, with no subscription
necessary. They are creations of Ambient Devices Inc., a start-up based
here that is attempting to sell "glanceable" Internet devices to convey
information quickly. Think high-tech cousins of the traditional clock,
gas gauge or toaster that dings to signify your toast is ready. Such
objects offer the sort of visual and auditory cues that help us process
information faster than modern computers, which require us to grab a
mouse, click around and read text.
"Cognitive psychologists call this pre-attentive
processing," said Ambient Devices President David Rose, "because it
uses a part of your brain that happens before your conscious mind
attends. Think of it as pure peripheral vision; you receive the
information without perceiving it as being taxing."
So far, three-year-old Ambient Devices has sold fewer
than 60,000 devices, none of which strikes me as the kind I would be
tempted to buy myself. Yet the company fascinates me because it is
working on the frontier of making computers more intuitive, simpler and
less demanding on our lives.
I recently dropped by the research laboratory where
the company's philosophy was born, the "Things That Think" group run by
professor Hiroshi Ishii at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
Media Lab. One of his students, Benjamin Resner, co-founded Ambient
Devices and serves as its vice president of technology. Among its
investors is MIT Media Lab founder Nicolas Negroponte.
MIT Media Lab
researcher Hiroshi Ishii demonstrates Topobos, programmable robots with
built-in memory that recall exactly how you moved them and can replay
the same motions later. (Leslie Walker - The Washington Post)
|
Ishii has for nine years been the brains behind what
MIT calls its tangible media research group, exploring approaches to
manipulating digital data that require more hands-on, up-close and
personal activity than the standard computer keyboard and mouse. His
lab looks more like a magician's playroom than a scientist's workplace.
Colorful pinwheels spin overhead, strung together like Christmas
lights. They are linked to a computer, so the speed of the spinning
wheels can become a signal of what traffic is like on the roads
outside, or how a company's internal data traffic is flowing. Sluggish
movement, for instance, might suggest that too many file transfers are
clogging an Internet pipeline.
Ishii wanders over to a small table, picks up a
glass container shaped like a perfume bottle and yanks its stopper.
Symphonic sounds fill the room. "Many elderly people cannot remember
how many medicines they have taken," he said. "These bottles could talk
to you."
The snazziest items in the room are
bright, colorful robotic building blocks that Ishii's researchers call
"Topobos," a prototype for a kind of toy. Topobos are simpler and
easier-to-use versions of Lego's MindStorms programmable robots, with
more advanced capabilities than the "Record & Play" toys Lego
released last year. Topobos require no computer programming and have
built-in memory allowing them to retain and replay physical movements.
You snap together plastic pieces to create animal-like creatures or
mechanical devices, then push a "record" button and move them around.
It memorizes the movements and replays them later.
