The Media Laboratory at MIT
The Media Laboratory opened its doors in the Wiesner Building, designed by I.M. Pei, in 1985. In its first decade, much of the Laboratory's activity centered around abstracting electronic content from its traditional physical representations, helping to create now-familiar areas such as digital video and multimedia. The success of this agenda is now leading to a growing focus on how electronic information overlaps with the everyday physical world. The Laboratory pioneered collaboration between academia and industry, and provides a unique environment to explore basic research and applications, without regard to traditional divisions among disciplines.

Retrospective
True to the vision of its founders, Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner, today's Media Laboratory continues to focus on the study, invention, and creative use of digital technologies to enhance the ways that people think, express, and communicate ideas, and explore new scientific frontiers. For information on current research activities at the Lab, please see the Research section.

Known around the world as a center for cutting-edge research, the Media Lab, through its blurring of the traditional boundaries between the disciplines, and by nurturing relationships between academia and industry, is at the forefront of the new technologies that will, sooner rather than later, be a part of our daily lives.
The Lab has begun a period of growth, both in Cambridge and abroad. For more information on the Lab's new foreign partnerships and expansions, and on future construction of the new Media Lab building in Cambridge, see our ML Abroad and Facilities pages.Research

The Media Laboratory provides a unique environment for exploring basic research and applications at the intersection of computation and the arts. Areas of research include: software agents; machine understanding; how children learn; human and machine vision; audition; speech interfaces; wearable computers; affective computing (a new branch of computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions); advanced interface design; tangible media, object-oriented video; interactive cinema; work in various forms of digital expression, from text, to graphics, to sound; and new approaches to spatial imaging, nanomedia, and nanoscale sensing.  

The Sustainable Village is working with the Media Laboratory at MIT to help redesign refugee camps as ecologically sustainable settlements. For more information about this project, click here. To learn more about the Media Laboratory, please click here.