Through social networks, blogs, forums, and chat interfaces, people can communicate and collaborate with almost anyone anywhere through the internet, sharing stories, skills, and schemes. However, social connections through the internet have thus far been largely limited to content in a web browser, making some communications, such as haptic and affective interactions awkward or impossible. I want to augment and reinvent online social interactions and communities with tangible interfaces at the MIT Media Lab.

My previous projects at the Media Lab have explored a range of web-based social interactions. This fall, for example, I worked as art director on a project called Tangible Web in the Tangible Media Group, which aims to create a set of lenses through which properties of the physical world are projected onto virtual objects on the web. Shadowbox, a project under Tangible Web, finds the number of concurrent viewers of a YouTube video and displays it as silhouettes of people watching the movie from the bottom of the window. Although Shadowbox is limited to a browser, it makes the presence of others on the web more palpable than the usual abstract display of usernames and numbers.

Another project that I worked on in the Tangible Media Group is WetPaint, a touchscreen installation for exploring multi-layered images. As head engineer of the project, I designed and implemented WetPaint to allow users to scrape through the layers of an image and leave voice notes on regions of interest, which then play when the regions are touched. WetPaint’s images are stored on Flickr.com, a popular photo sharing community, and links to the audio notes are stored as note icons on the images. The use of such a popular site makes it easy for people to remotely browse the images and listen to the annotations. While WetPaint is still an interface for a two dimensional display, it fuses the haptic interaction of scraping through layers of images and the social interaction of sharing discoveries about the layers through the interface itself and through Flickr.com. WetPaint is an example of how interactive displays can augment existing web-based social networks such as Flickr.

I took Prof. Ishii's Tangible Interfaces class this fall, where I expressed my ideas of tangible, social interfaces through my team's first design project for the class, SOS (Stress OutSourced), which considers human connectedness and how it can be used to relieve stress. With the SOS wearable device, a stressed individual can send an anonymous signal, which is received by other wearers of the device from around the world, who can then send a response of acknowledgment and sympathy. All the incoming responses combine to activate motors in the worn device to create a back massage for the stressed individual. SOS illustrates how web-based social interface can transcend the computer screen and how individuals and groups from around the world can communicate both virtually and physically. Through haptic and affective interactions, SOS connects anonymous strangers and builds an awareness of a global community.

My previous projects at the Media Lab clearly demonstrate my multi-disciplinary background. I have shown that I can design, engineer, and invent interfaces spanning a range of web-based social interactions, from a virtual lens for a web browser to a full prototype haptic interface. In the future, I plan to build more tangible interfaces for social interaction. One idea that I have been considering is a piano for collaborative remote performance. Having played classical piano for 17 years, I believe that music is more than just sound; an integral part of music is the tangible interaction between the player and the instrument as well as the interaction among players of a group. I want to build a piano equipped with a panel over the keys that shows the hands of someone playing another piano. Both the movement of the hands and the sound of playing is transferred between the two long-distance players. The piano interface completely escapes the traditional screen-based model for remote social interaction. Instead, it brings faraway individuals together and gives them an elegant tool for performing in unison.