MIT Media Lab

I am currently a UROP (undergraduate researcher) at the MIT Media Lab. My username in the lab is "theplaz".

Current projects

• SocialMenu, Viral Communications Group - Developer (UROP) Aug 2009 -

Lab History

The Media Lab is a fascinating place. It is an interdisciplinary lab located at MIT which studies how we interact with the world. It was originally supposed to be called the "Communications Lab". People study new interfaces for interacting with computers.

The Center for Future Banking [1] studies how our relation with banking may by affected by the technology. It's sponsored by Bank of America for a few million a year. A recent project was to create a wallet that shows your current bank balance. This not only required some technical wizardry to create, but also some studies to see if it is effective. This is a good example of a lab project.

There are also fun projects, like "Guitar Hero" which came out of the Orchestra of the Future group. I had never really considered the group's work to be directly marketable, but Guitar hero was a big hit. That goes to show that big hits come out of nowhere.

The lab has a diverse range of projects. Some people are working on prosthetic legs. The beauty of the lab is that sponsors fund the lab as a whole; not a certain project. That means that people are free to study what they want and collaborate. The goal is the be thinking up demos, not proposals.

The book The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M. I. T. (Paperback) is interesting because it was written in 1988. The Media Lab was at the cutting edge of products we take for granted today. For instance, __ was researching "Paperback Movies" which we now know as DVDs. The lab no only thinks up the ideas, but it develops them in depth technically. The motto of the lab is "demo or die"

Official Description

The MIT Media Lab applies an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life-technologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most basic notions of human capabilities. Unconstrained by traditional disciplines, Lab designers, engineers, artists, and scientists work atelier-style in some 30 research groups conducting more than 400 projects that range from neuroengineering, to how children learn, to developing the city car of the future. Lab researchers foster a unique culture of learning by doing, developing technologies that empower people of all ages, from all walks of life, in all societies, to design and invent new possibilities for themselves and their communities.