In the Fall of 1993 Larry Friedlander, along with Professor Glorianna Davenport and students at the MIT Media Lab, created an experimental installation in the Villers theater at MIT called Wheel of Life: An Interactive Transforamtional Environment. This installation explored what happens when interactive technology expands beyond the computer box and moves into our daily environments. Wheel of Life drew its techniques from the worlds of theater, architectural design, cinema, and interactive computing to to create a new kind of space, one that was magically responsive to the visitors' presence and actions. As visitors moved through the various environments, they worked with partners who were seated outside of the installation at computer workstations to transform the spaces physically and to create stories and changing multimedia events. Using technology to create complex narrative spaces raises fascinating issues in the psychology of collaborative invention and in the design of spaces shared by people and machines. Friedlander will discuss the implication of this move 'out of the box' for the future of interface design and of interactive applications.
Click here for a longer description of the Wheel of Life