Collaborative interaction and responsive environments - sensors that enable individuals and instrument multitudes

Summary form only given. As processors have escalated in capability via Moore's law, electronic sensors have similarly advanced. Rather than dedicate a small number of sensors to hardwired designs that expressly measure parameters of interest, we can begin to envision a near future with sensors as commodity - where dense, multimodal sensing is the rule rather than the exception, and where features relevant to many applications are dynamically extracted from a rich data stream. This article discusses on recent results from several projects at the MIT Media Lab's responsive environments group that explore various embodiments of such dense sensing structures, including high-bandwidth, wireless multimodal sensor clusters, massively distributed, ultra-low-power "featherweight" sensor nodes, and ultra-dense sensor networks as digital "skins". This article focuses on applications that foster collaborative interaction of different sorts, including large interactive surfaces, passive wireless sensors for collaborative musical interaction with multiple players, low-cost sensors for large-group interaction, and electronic badges that facilitate large meetings and acquire data for analyzing social dynamics