Tangible Bits at MIT — Research in No Man’s Land

If interaction designers have some imaginary holy temple to which they turn every day, or at least whenever they get a break from their commercial projects, so dry of creativity, one entirely uncontroversial place comes to my mind: the Media Lab at the American MIT. Of course, this university ranks among the best in most of its fields, and not only in the technical ones; after all, to this day MIT provides a home to one of the most influential theoretical linguists of the 20th century, Noam Chomsky. It is no surprise, then, that its design programmes are among the best that can currently be studied anywhere in the world. And it has been so for quite some time. Do you remember the Aspen Movie Map project from 1978? It was a revolutionary hypermedia system that mapped the town of Aspen, Colorado, using video cameras mounted on a car. The user could then walk through the mapped town virtually in the accompanying program, and even, after clicking on selected buildings, see information about the place. The individual scenes of the town were not continuous, but even so it was in many respects a precursor of Google Street View. And that, mind you, by several decades.

The current achievements of the MIT Media Lab are so numerous that even if I listed them in detail I would forget some important ones. So I will resort to those closest to me: Dr Hugh Herr, who leads research in biomechatronics, specifically the creation of robotic prostheses and wearables, whose aim is not only to restore lost human abilities (Dr Herr himself uses his prostheses, for he lost his legs) but also — a no less ambitious demand placed on Dr Herr’s research group — to extend human abilities, to go beyond what is ordinarily considered possible for a human being. As a second example of the Media Lab’s achievements I will mention Neri Oxman. She moves in the grey, and therefore fascinating, zone between technology, design and biology. For interaction designers, however, the most interesting part of the Media Lab is the research group called Tangible Media. What is it about?

The adjective “tangible” can be rendered as palpable, material, graspable. Tangible Media thus deals with computation and interactions that you can literally touch. The main thesis of the group, led by Hiroshi Ishii, is that people have evolved with many skills which, however, go unused in the current classic paradigm of interaction with a graphical user interface. The aim should therefore be, at least according to Ishii and others, to remove the physical/digital duality so that the transition between the two is smooth, realistic and rich in interactions. Or, in the group’s own words: it is time to move from the rendered bits on the bitmap screen of the digital world to the graspable, programmable bits of the physical world. All of this would be lovely were it not for the “elephant in the room” which renders this vision, if not irrelevant, then at least marginal, a kind of art-and-technology experiment. That elephant in the room is virtual reality.

Don’t get me wrong, art and experiment are immensely important, for they broaden our epistemic horizons, offer a view of the world through new lenses, and these views often have a cascading, recursive impact on our knowledge of what “is”, because a new lens throws new light on what already exists, the old, the familiar. On the contrary, in a certain way I am entirely in favour of merging the physical and the digital. I just think there is a far more suitable medium for this union: the aforementioned virtual reality.

Software has a number of properties. For me, though, the strangest is the fact that software is the only space in our universe where the laws of physics do not apply (work is reportedly under way on a mathematical understanding of the singularity of black holes, and there are theories claiming that the laws of physics hold even in black holes). It is completely irrelevant that in real, physical form a person is short, wide, ugly; in virtual reality they can be an athlete, Miss World, or none of these and take the form of a butterfly or of transparent jelly. Do they want to go to Jupiter with the family for the summer? Do they want a family without the woman having to go through the pains of childbirth? No problem, just choose the right variables and constants and the child will be generated in the next frame of the scene. Should the woman wish to keep the pains of childbirth, no problem. But why not share the pain with the man, or with an orca, or with that butterfly, or with whoever she is having the child with? After all, in virtual reality even a man can give birth.

It is probably clear where I am going with all this. Joining the physical and the digital is a respectable achievement, but isn’t the ultimate goal to remove the physical altogether, or rather to simulate it in virtual reality? While overcoming the laws of physics in the real world is strenuous, often financially too, in VR it is a matter of changing a few parameters of the simulation.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, all the big players are racing each other to see who will make the best use of virtual reality. Virtual reality has infinite potential, limited only by human imagination and, for the moment, still by raw computing power and network capacity. The world is walking; no, the world is sprinting towards virtual reality.

That is also why it seems to me that the work of Tangible Media at MIT, however artistically valuable and “cool”,  is a little like research in no man’s land. Yes, people long for pixels and bits to merge, but what they demand is not a symbiotic relationship but a destructive event, the annihilation of atoms and the establishment of a dictatorship of pixels, or bits. Such a world, more real than reality itself, will bring the true emancipation of humankind. The question that then remains is whether it will be a radically new world, or merely the recovery of lost information from the tree of knowledge: reading the thoughts of the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler, it occurs to us that we have long been living in such a virtual reality. But more on that another time.