Project Website http://ttt.media.mit.edu/research/badge.html
Project Start Date September 2003
The Ubiquitous Experimental Research Badge (UbER-Badge) is a powerful platform for developing new applications in person-person and person-event interaction. This design takes a huge stride beyond the Media Lab’s previously successful badges (e.g., the Meme Tag (1998) and Thinking Tags (1997)). It is highly evolved in both its technological power and its aesthetics.
This Badge is a general computing platform for experimentation with distributed systems, and the analysis and enhancment of group social interaction. Although The Badge will be used in crowds of approximately 200 people during Media Lab events, it is designed to be open and expandable for future research use, able to encompass essentially any crowd size and a host of possible applications.
Sporting both IR and RF interconnection, the Badge will be used to explore multihop “viral” message passing and paging, gradient-based people locators, and passive accumulation of the interest profile of the wearer.