Hiroshi Ishii, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Media Lab, will give the Lab's next Perspectives lecture, entitled "Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces Between People, Bits and Atoms." The lecture, which is open to the public, will be Tuesday, Feb. 25 at 5pm in the Bartos Theater (Building E15).
"Tangible Bits" is an attempt to bridge the gap between our physical environment and cyberspace by developing ways to make bits (digital information) accessible through physical surfaces, everyday objects and ambient media such as light, sound or air, according to Professor Ishii. His goal is to move away from the current model of human-computer interaction (almost always represented by a monitor, keyboard and mouse) and create a new set of "tangible interfaces."
Professor Ishii, internationally known as the designer of innovative media for real-time, remote collaboration, works in the Media Lab's Information and Entertainment group. A project leader for the Lab's Things That Think consortium, he has spent most of his career at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., where his research team designed TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard-pioneering collaboration media that provide seamless, shared workspace across distances.
In conjunction with this work, he has made important theoretical contributions in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work, groupware design and human-computer interfaces. He received the BS, MS and PhD degrees in computer engineering from Hokkaido University.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on February 12, 1997.
