MIT Tango

Tonight I tango at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Building 36, Floor 7, Lobby, is what the website says.

The elevators open onto a patch of geek heaven: small, functional and forgotten by time. Two walls of glass open to mid-distance vistas. College-dorm plants and beat up wooden tables have accumulated in one corner. Computer monitors, the big, old-fashioned TV-set kind, line the base of one wall. The floor is linoleum. The elevator doors are gray; in the ladies’ room the stalls are red-orange. Everything is circa 1970 and aging well.

At 6 p.m. on a weeknight, the space is filled with silence—not the silence of a deserted building, but the stillness of concentration. You sense computer and human brains absorbed in one another behind the locked double doors marked Alarm Will Sound.

From the ceiling hangs a bright blue banner, the directory for this building. It says:

Quantum Computation and Communication
Circuits, Systems, Signals and Communications

Tango!

* * *

Actually, I’ve been deep into tango all afternoon. I’ve been listening to Patti Maes, founder and director of the MIT Media Lab’s Interactive Experience Research Group, talk about just-in-time information.

You may have heard of just-in-time, the buzz word of the 1990s. It means don’t stockpile inventory, make the stuff as orders come in, and use FedEx to ship it.

That’s not exactly what Patti means by the phrase. This is MIT, after all. Take the quantum leap.

Personal Interaction with Augmented Objects.

This is cool stuff. There’s a lot of RFID and Bluetooth and infrared gadgetry. Databases and messaging and matchmaking (that’s technotalk for networking). Fantasy applications for health care, the environment, shopping, research … and, though Pattie doesn’t know it yet,

Tango!

By way of example, consider three gadgets:

Wristband Know-It-All
It looks like a sports watch with a chip instead of watch face on it. The chip knows what you like. Never mind how.

Now, let’s say you go shopping at a (real-world!) bookstore, where every book is outfitted with a chip of its own. Every time you touch a book, your chip and the book’s chip have a little chat. If they like each other, your wristband sends a message to your cell phone, and your cell phone searches the web for more information about that book. After all the searching is done, your cell phone calls you.

This is MIT, so of course, the cell phone is an overachiever. It offers you everything it learned on the web: product description, images, reviews, comments from other users, rankings, related products … and on and on, right on down to the table of contents and sample chapter. All meant to help you to decide whether to buy the book in your hand.


The Ring of Power Shopping
This one is much simpler. Just like the wristband, your ring has a chip that knows what you like. The merchandise has its own chip. You buy only organic peanut butter? In the grocery store, just start pointing at jars of peanut butter until the ring lights up. Bingo, you’ve found a match!


Gaze-Based Interface: Caught You Looking!
You wear a cell phone earpiece with an infrared receiver built in. You stand before an object—a car’s engine, let’s say, since Pattie Maes does. The engine is covered with infrared beacons that are constantly send out signals. The beacons are like little lighthouses.

When your gaze falls on a certain area of the car’s engine, your receiver picks up the signal from the nearest beacon. Bingo! That part of the engine talks to you.

Pattie Maes showed a video of this. In the video, a woman is examining a car’s engine. She stops to look at a part that resembles an octopus.

The engine says to the woman: “Would you like to know how the air intake manifold works?”

The woman says, “Yes!”

Everyone laughs. Of course. I assume that, like me, they already know.


The MIT Version of Real-World Applications

Wouldn’t it be great, Pattie says, if you wore this wristband, and every time you picked up a can of diet soda or Dunkin’ Donut, you got a brief message about health risks?

She is drowned out by laughter. We honestly think she is joking.

Wouldn’t that be great? she persists, but in the wake of our hilarity she sounds forlorn.

Someone asks whether the Media Lab patents its inventions.

If they have commercial application (read: useful), the lab registers patents, Pattie says. How many so far? Five, Pattie says. She’s been at it 15 years--but of course, usefulness is not the point.

Pattie is a small, tidy woman, but in her mind she is that crazy guy from Back to the Future. She and her crew are inventors and, like all mad scientists and academicians, they are clueless when it comes to the real world.

A wristband that gives you the table of contents for the book you are holding in your hand? Please.

What these gadgets need is big, ubiquitous, perplexing problems to solve. They need opportunities to do things so much better than the way they are currently done that no one can imagine how they managed before.

Killer apps, that’s what we’re after!

E-mail is one. Here’s another:

Tango Is the Killer App

Yes, tango is the killer app for Pattie’s whole array of Personal Interaction with Augmented Objects inventions. Consider the options:

The Lead Detective
It’s Friday night at the Merc. The place is packed. You’ve enjoyed dancing with the leads you know. You’d like to expand your circle. But dancing with strangers is so hard…

You are wearing a beautiful bracelet. You can hardly see the eenie-weenie chip embedded in the scrollwork. As you enter the embrace, your bracelet passes by a chip embedded on the back of the lead’s neck.

Bypass the ringing cell phone. A chippy voice files its report in your ear:

“Style: Classic milonguero. Ranking: Intermediate. Best for vals. Does not lead the cross. Would you like to hear reviews from other dancers? Would you like to leave a comment? Would you like a list of other, similar …?”

This application has the weakness of complexity. When you’re building a killer app, it’s best to simplify. Let’s keep looking.

The Sorting Stone
My what a lovely ring you are wearing! Look at the size of that rock! You circulate. As you pass by each lead, you raise a languid hand. If the stone glows emerald, you will catch his eye later. If it glows ruby, you pass.

High-Tech Cabeceo
He looks at you. You return his gaze. The beacon embedded in his temple sends a signal that strikes the diamond dangling from your ear. A chippy voice murmurs. Perhaps you smile. Perhaps you look away.

New Company Seeks Investors!
From the prospectus:

…Personal Interaction with Augmented Objects, Inc., recognizes that these apps require leads to undergo the minor inconvenience of surgical embeddings: A chip here or there, an infrared beacon… This should be considered inconsequential, like microchipping a pet.

It’s all outpatient, local anesthetic, you’ll feel a pinch, a few small lumps under the skin. The rate of infection is less than 8%. Side effects may include redness, swelling, itchiness, twitching. Chips may malfunction, causing a screeching or squawking sound. Chips may migrate.

Personal Interaction with Augmented Objects, Inc., anticipates that early adopters and investors will be women. For this reason, PIAOInc is offering free, onsite implants to the first 100 investors’ leads.

The prototypes are done. The patents are pending. I’m putting Pattie to work on Phase II: stealth-implantation technology. All I need is an investor.

If this were 10 years ago, venture capitalists would be ringing my phone off the hook.

I miss the technology bubble.