Researchers make the point that Guinness Hopstore is good for you RESEARCH FOCUS

MEDIA LAB in  the Guinness Hopstore, where the arts meet the sciences, is an impressive mirroring of the work of its sibling lab in the MIT, reports Anne Byrne.

We perched, somewhat dubiously, on the edge of the comfortable red couch with the two leads coming out of it. Senior research scientist Dr Gary McDarby smeared a clear gel on our fingers and taped them to electrodes.

A communal torture device? A postmodern take on the electric chair? No.

Time to watch a short animated film of dragons floating among the stars. It was a soothing, relaxing, silly one-and-a-half-minute odyssey, preparing us to play "Relax to Win".

At the end of the film, the dragons had arrived at a race track. The game began. I was "in control" of the red dragon while Transition Year student Katie controlled the green dragon. The gel transmitted our skin's galvanic responses. The electrical resistance of the skin varies with blood pressure and sweat gland response. The less stressed you are, the faster your dragon travels.

Katie's green dragon ran along the race track on the large screen covering the wall in front of us. Then it simply took to the air, floating off to cross the finish line. Katie was obviously a singularly unstressed student, enjoying her week's work experience with The Irish Times.

Meanwhile, the red dragon plodded along, taking small deliberate steps in response to the stress levels being communicated to it via the electrodes on my fingers. (Could the impending demise of EL be affecting my response, or worries about a new mortgage, or simply the fact that my peripheral blood flow is extremely sluggish?)

What seemed like a fun game, albeit counterintuitive, is really a tool with a serious intent. Located in the former Guinness Hopstore in Dublin, Media Lab Europe has brought together a number of interdisciplinary teams to work on a variety of imaginative projects. "Relax to Win" is the product of a project involving a graphic artist, a composer, a cognitive scientist, a psychologist, a games programmer, hardware engineer and biomedical engineer.

The Mind Games group explores the relationship between the virtual and the real world. The "Relax to Win" game is designed to help people learn to relax. A more advanced development measures biometric parameters such as heart rate and facial feature response. The final version may have applications for children with attention deficit disorder, suggests McDarby. He says BBC (one of MLE's sponsors) is already making a pilot version of "Relax to win" aimed at helping drivers deal with road rage.

The Hopstore has been converted into a beautiful open space, full of surprises. There's the lime green senor chair with its musical interface, slightly grubby hammocks just for relaxing, thinking or sleeping off jet lag, beautiful wooden floors, huge pot plants, high ceilings, lot of space, a robot with an electric blue wig, and stairs where electronic birdsong rewards those with light footfalls.

It's probably the most unusual research space in Ireland. The open-plan design encourages interaction among researchers rather than sealing them into discrete units. There's space to think and talk. The interdisciplinary nature of the research groups is also highly unusual in Ireland, with artists and musicians working with technologists and scientists.

Media Lab Europe has been the subject of some controversy since it opened in July 2000 (see panel), but the interdisciplinary work, where the arts meet the sciences, is an impressive mirroring of the work of its sibling lab in MIT, in the US. McDarby is adamant that without MLE many of the researchers now working in the Hopstore would not have come to Ireland. He says he would not have returned to Ireland from Australia if it weren't for the advent of MLE.

The Higher Education Authority and MLE recently announced the funding of 16 collaborative projects ranging from nanotechnology to biosensors to robotics to computers in learning and brain interfaces. These projects represent collaborations with a number of Irish colleges: TCD (six projects), UCD (five projects), UL (two projects) and DCU, NUI Maynooth and St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, involved in one project each. MLE has a mere eight corporate sponsors, compared to MIT Media Lab, which has attracted some 180 sponsors. The Government is MLE's main sponsor.

Senior research scientist Dr Carol Strohecker says MLE has grown tremendously over the past six to nine months. MLE and MIT Media Lab will share intellectual property during the initial 10-year collaboration period.

There are more than 50 full-time employees at MLE, according to Strohecker, organised into a number of research groups. MLE does not award degrees so research students are linked to other institutions. At present, there are students from TCD, UCD, DCU and the University of Gothenburg.

Graduate students taking MIT's media, arts and science programme can get credit for two courses with titles smacking of the US at its wordiest: a "workshop in community-maintainable collaborative online spaces and tools" and "environments for contemplaytion (sic)". This latter course is taught by Strohecker, who is the principal researcher in a group called "Everyday Learning".

"In this group, we look at learning as it occurs throughout our lifetime, as distinguished from learning in more formal settings. Learning motivated by curiosity, desire or adaptation to environment has a different quality from someone telling you what to learn and how to learn. The idea that people are learning with objects is a major theme in the 'contemplaytion' course." As an illustration, she shows us into an area peopled by dinosaur models.

The bones can be put together in a variety of ways. They are rigged with ID tags that transmit information to a computer programme via a radio frequency. A virtual image of the dinosaur prances across the wall. If the bones are incorrectly balanced, the dinosaur will lurch or fall on screen.

It's a clever way of linking the physical and virtual worlds.

MLE, with its weird mixture of toys, computer technology, and biomedical science may seem like a luxury that Ireland, with its literacy and educational disadvantage problems, simply can't afford. Yet, basic research is also a commodity that Ireland lacks in sufficient quantities. Perhaps it doesn't have to be an either/or situation. Only time, and future Government budgets or corporate sponsors, will tell.