Things that think

Things That Think (TTT) is a major research forum at the MIT Media Lab. It engages over 50 researchers at MIT and approximately 50 industrial partners from around the world to explore notions of intelligence channeled through everyday things. Levi-Strauss, the world's largest apparel maker, joined Things That Think partly because of a technology called the Personal Pair. This is a process for making pants on demand, where a customer goes to a store, is measured in several places, the measurements are sent by email to a factory, and the garment is built to spec. Smart shoes are underway at the Media Lab. Physicists at the Media Lab are experimenting with several technologies for capturing power parasitically, from the force of one's footfalls. Hyphos is a new wireless, self-organizing network. Hyphos uses short-range transceivers, relaying messages among the nodes. The cost of a node is intended to be very low. Transmissions are tightly localized, and routing is fully distributed to assure robust connections even as nodes roam.