Pattie Maes came to the Creativity World Forum 2011 in her homecountry to present all kinds of gizmos they’re working on at the American MIT Media Lab, where she resides as an Associate Professor.

Using an image of a Xerox Star, one of the most revolutionary computing devices in 1981, and one of the current day iMac to show how the way we interact with these devices hasn’t changed in thirty years. Even smartphones and tablet show a keyboard, albeit on-screen, and use your finger instead of the mouse, but the paradigm hasn’t changed much.

They see a huge gap between the digital world and the physical world in user-computer-interaction.

Another thing she touches upon is that there is a humongous amount of information available, but that there’s not an easy way to access to it. The question that guides the research at MIT Media Lab is “How can we seamlessly access digital information in our physical lifes?”

Pattie Maes then proceeded to show us some of the devices, or better: new input methods, they are working on at her university. The most famous, thanks to TED, is Sixth Sense, a combination of a camera, color markers on your fingertips, a projector and a mirror makes a pretty nifty new device. They’re working with Samsung, NEC and Google to make commercial versions.

Other new ideas included Siftables, simple blocks you can put together to perform computing tasks, as if you were physically building the algorithm. This has been used by toy company Hasbro to create Scrabbleflash, a modernized version of the classic letter game. Or LuminAR, a complete computing package you can screw into the plug of a lightbulb, which includes a camera and a projector and creates a computer on-the-go.

Or a new cut-and-paste paradigm they dubbed Sparsh, where you put your finger on the screen of your smartphone to cut information and then paste it using the same finger onto you laptop. Of course, the information isn’t stored inside your finger, but in the cloud (read: a hipster term for the internet), and your finger is the key.

In short, they’re trying to think outside of the computer box.

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