Tangible Bits and Radical Atoms seek to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation. They make bits directly manipulatable and perceptible both in the foreground and background of our consciousness (peripheral awareness).
Our goal is to invent new media for artistic expression, communication, and design, taking advantage of the richness of our human senses and the skills we develop throughout our lifetime of interacting with the physical world, as well as the computational reflection enabled by real-time sensing and digital feedback.
During the past quarter century, our research can be seen as a battle against the Pixel Empire, represented most definitively in the trend of the “metaverse.” We believe that augmented physical/digital materials that people can touch and manipulate should be the new media to interact with the digital world instead of pixels in an HMD. We envision the “MATTERverse” as an alternative future of the pixel-oriented metaverse.