Tag Archives: MIT

Carlo Ratti’s latest architectural feat is 8 tennis courts stacked in a 300ft tower!

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Carlo Ratti has done it again with the Playscaper – a 300 ft tall tower that stacks eight tennis courts! In collaboration with Italo the ambitious concept makes tennis courts more accessible in urban areas where space is often an issue. What makes this more interesting is its flexible nature, Playscraper can be quickly assembled and disassembled which makes it easier to host competitions around the world while reducing construction costs and not requiring a large area.

Playscaper will provide 60,000 ft2 (5,500 m2) of total playing space with its vertically layered courts. The tower’s structure will be made using lightweight stainless-steel which is inspired by the outer shell of a spacecraft and developed by Broad Sustainable Building. “This project would not just create a new icon for sports lovers. It also experiments with a new type of public space, extending vertically instead of horizontally. The tower is easy to install and dismantle and can be easily moved. This flexible approach fits the circular nature of today’s sports competitions, which move from location to location throughout the year,” says architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, founder of CRA and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab.

Designed not just for the players on the court, the long sides of each ‘box’ incorporate an electronic façade that can stream sports matches and other digital content. While on the short sides, transparent walls offer panoramic views of the outdoors. The project has been developed for rcs sport, the sport and media branch of the leading European multimedia publishing group rcs mediagroup. Carlo Ratti Associati worked on the design as part of a larger team of engineers and technical consultants.

Designer: Carlo Ratti Associati

MIT’s Pandemic Response Design Challenge winner is a mask that actively scans the air for germs

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A winner of the MIT Pandemic Response CoLab #ReimagineMask Challenge, the Social Mask doesn’t just stop microparticles and microorganisms from entering your respiratory system… it alerts you of their presence too.

The mask comes with a transparent design, which seems fitting since it focuses on data transparency too. The mask sports a 3D-printed frame that houses filters along with a biosensor that actively monitors the air you breathe. Air quality metrics are sent to your phone, capturing not just pollution levels but the presence of germs too. The sensor detects the presence of air-borne pathogens, alerting you if there’s something hazardous in the air. Data transparency goes both ways too, with a temperature sensor built into the cheek-area of the polycarbonate frame, allowing people around you to know your own body temperature… a feature that lets others know if you’re healthy or feeling feverish.

The Social Mask flips the contact-tracing argument by just tracing the air instead. More than just filtering the air you breathe of contaminants, the Social Mask lets you know if they’re there in the first place, and works to create a map of the places you visit, actively giving you stats of what the air was like when you were there. Pretty neat, eh?!

Designer: Burzo Ciprian

MIT tests autonomous ‘Roboat’ that can carry two passengers

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We’ve heard plenty about the potential of autonomous vehicles in recent years, but MIT is thinking about different forms of self-driving transportation. For the last five years, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) an...

MIT Scientists Working on Tech That Can Manipulate Your Dreams

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Dreams are weird enough all on their own. So the idea that technology could be used to influence your dreams seems like it could produce even stranger results. Now, researchers from MIT are developing a system that could do just that.

A team of scientists at MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group has come up with a way to monitor one’s sleep cycle and to induce thoughts using a method called Targeted Dream Incubation or TDI. The technique involves the use of a hand-worn sleep tracking device that monitors the subject’s heart rate, skin conductivity, and the position of their fingers to determine when they have entered an early sleep state called hypnagogia. Working in concert with an app, the system delivers audio cues to the subject, then wakes the sleeper with prompts to record what they remembered in a journal.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from .

In their study of 25 participants, the researchers found that 67% of their dream reports mentioned some obvious incorporation of the suggestion. Take the example of the word “tree.” The dream journals included descriptions of a tree-shaped car, a shaman sitting beneath a tree, and images of trees splitting into pieces. We’re clearly not talking about the kind of detailed world-building depicted in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but the technique could be used to help inspire creative brainstorming sessions on a particular topic or to help redirect stressful dreams in a more positive direction.

You can find more detail on the dream manipulation research study and its possibilities over on Live Science and the MIT Media Lab website.

[via adafruit blog]

MIT researchers show how ‘Dr. Spot’ could help diagnose COVID-19

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Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots have been used in many creative ways, from surveying a Ford plant in Michigan to herding sheep in New Zealand. Earlier this year, the tech company announced Spot was chipping in to help coronavirus patients -- now, we’re...