Touch the virtual

By Clark BoydThe World, WGBH BostonLaptops and smartphones allow easy access computing power, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology want to go one step further by turning the entire world into a computer.At this year’s Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Boston, the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab unveiled the latest prototype of SixthSense, a wearable, gesture-driven computing platform that can continually augment the physical world with digital infor

Sixth Sense: A Web you can wear

For all its celebrated omnipresence, the World Wide Web can seem like a closed world unto itself. It’s more portable now, to be sure. But those who visit it still must stare at glowing screens and tune out everything else around them. To Pranav Mistry, this all feels highly inconvenient. The postdoctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wants online life to converge with real life, be it during a conversation at a party or a commute on the interstate. His latest project, a

By Clark BoydThe World, WGBH BostonLaptops and smartphones

By Clark BoydThe World, WGBH BostonLaptops and smartphones allow easy access computing power, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology want to go one step further by turning the entire world into a computer.At this year’s Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Boston, the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab unveiled the latest prototype of SixthSense, a wearable, gesture-driven computing platform that can continually augment the physical world with digital infor

New System to Thwart Unwanted Video and Still Digital Photography

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have completed a prototype device that can block digital-camera function in a given area. Commercial versions of the technology could be used to stymie unwanted use of video or still cameras.