Blending the old with the new, the Chameleon Guitar uses a swappable soundboards to pick up the resonant qualities of various woods, metals, plastics, and well, pretty much anything to produce desired sounds. The boards can be built to mimic guitar sounds from classical guitars to electric guitars, and more. Designed by Amit Zoran under guidance from Pattie Maes and Marco Coppiardi, he is now working on the project as part of his Masters. Amit one day hopes to take the product to market.

Pattie Maes, founder of the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab, speaks at TED in depth about the project Sixth Sense in collaboration with Pranav Mistry. While the project has received far spread interest and the availability of a short video earlier, Pattie’s talk at TED has now been released. Check it out to see many more demonstrations and potential applications for the Sixth Sense technology.

The Actuated Workbench uses a bed of electromagnets to control physical objects placed on top of it. First published in 2002 by Gian Pangaro, Dan Maynes-Aminzade, and Professor Hiroshi Ishii, development was continued. Dan (aka Monzy) has released a more recent video demonstrating the improvements made as well as some interesting new interaction possibilities.

Benjamin Mako Hill talks about Selectricity, a web platform which helps people make better decisions. Benjamin speaks of the advantages of using preferential voting and how Selectricity can be used for voting decisions being made in our every day lives.

Pranav Mistry and Pattie Maes, working in the MIT Media Lab, have developed the Sixth Sense prototype which allows users to interact with information on any flat surface without the need for a touch screen.

Brandon Taylor from the Object Based Media Group at MIT Media Lab talks about The Bar of Soap project.  He shares how they explored placing sensors in objects and speculates on a future where sensors are embedded in every day objects such as a smart phone and how it might function differently depending on how it is held.