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The goal of the Things That Think (TTT) consortium is to invent the future
of digitally augmented objects and environments. We bring a unique, boundary-breaking
perspective to research, uniting leaders in science, engineering, design,
and art. Grounded by extensive corporate sponsor interaction, our prototypes
and demonstrations aim to inspire the products and services of tomorrow.
We invite forward-thinking sponsor companies and organizations to join
TTT in realizing this vision.
TTT began in 1995 with the goal of embedding computation into everyday
things such as clothing, jewelry, and tables. We achieved that goal, placing
us at the forefront of a global trend toward ubiquitous, pervasive, and
invisible computing initiatives.
The frontier now needs to move toward deep questions: How do you design
interactions and environments that people enjoy? How do you coordinate
enormously complex systems of unreliable sensate things having millions
of data channels with the grace of a conductor leading an orchestra? How
do you make things that really learn?
Our vision has evolved to embrace things that utilize computational capability
to serve important human priorities (e.g., facilitating creativity and
productivity, taking control of individual health, improving safety and
well-being, and enhancing interaction and learning), while continuing
to innovate new devices and enabling technologies. We must not fill our
environment with computational things that disrupt, distract, or violate
human aesthetic sensibilities. This new prerogative preserves TTT's strong
technical core of researchers, while challenging them to address the quality
of the human interactive experience.
To accomplish this goal,
we are pursuing themes that include:
- sophisticated sensing and computational architectures that augment,
animate, and coordinate networks of things;
- seamless interfaces that bridge digital, physical, and human
needs for creative expression and design;
- an understanding of context and affect that makes things think
at a much deeper level.
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