MIT's Media Lab turns the world around

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab came to town yesterday and the world as we thought we knew it was picked up, turned around, shaken about, and thrown back at us in forms and shapes that literally boggled the mind.

The occasion was the formal launch by the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, of MediaLabEurope, the Dublin-based independent research arm of MIT's famed Media Lab.

And rather than simply opening a building - although the lab also previewed its new facilities in the former Guinness Hop Store - Media Lab and MLE director Mr Nicholas Negroponte served up a two-day symposium featuring a dozen of the Lab's top researchers.

Topping the bill with Mr Negroponte, a leading member of the digerati, were Prof Marvin Minsky, the noted artificial intelligence pioneer, and Prof Seymour Papert, a passionate advocate of technology as a learning tool.

Thus, under the hooded eyes of the 17th century portraits high on the walls of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, we heard about 21st century wonders such as micro-machines that can be printed out by an inkjet printer, a sensor chair in which people can make music by waving their arms about, interactive cinema, electronic ink, a silicon pen tip which draws lines a single atom wide, speakers that emit a stream of "ultrasound" that gets louder as you move away, and all sorts of other objects that think, thanks to the merging of bits and atoms, machine and body.

The mixture of speakers, styles and subjects was truly chaotic - but according to Mr Negroponte, chaotic is exactly the condition the Media Lab, and MLE, most aspires to (along with "unconventional" and "anti-Establishment", he said).

The lab is "an intellectually different environment", he added, and MIT chose to locate MLE in the Republic because he feels these unusual strengths are valued here.

"[The Republic] is a country that has a great respect for madness," he quipped.

Certainly, the specially-invited audience of 300 or so academics, artists, technologists, corporate donors and prospective donors seemed unfazed by a string of unorthodox projects with titles like Lifelong Kindergarten, Opera of the Future, Personal Information Architecture, Nanoscale Sensing and Machine Listening.

And no one tittered at discovering that some eminent researchers hold titles such as the Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts and Sciences or Lego Professor of Learning Research.

But such titles sum up what the Media Lab is all about, and what the Republic and the rest of Europe can expect to see transplanted here as MLE enrolls its first students in two months' time.

Playfulness in particular is central to the Media Lab approach, researcher after researcher made clear.

"When you play, you're never more creative," said researcher Mr Michael Hawley, who specialises in interactive toys.

"A toy is a tool for making your imagination real."

But at the Media Lab, it seems nearly every project could be classified as a toy.

The audience saw a tempting range of digital worlds full of objects one wanted to reach out and try for oneself - computerised robots built of Lego, interactive walls that react to passersby, wearable computer clothing, strangely-shaped instruments that do different things and emit different noises depending on the software they're running, shoes that know where you are and what you're doing, glasses that will tell you the name of the person you've just met, a diamond and ruby brooch that pulses with colour in time to your heartbeat.

By the autumn, the Liberties is never going to be the same.