Seeing Phone Conversations
Given that we’re visual creatures, it’s surprising how much of the day we spend immersed in an audio-only medium: the telephone. But at the MIT Media Lab, researchers have built a device that bridges that gap, adding a mesmerizing visual component to phone conversations. Don’t think picture-phones, which have repeatedly flopped with consumers: instead the Visiphone, developed by Karrie Karahalios and colleagues in the Media Lab’s Sociable Media group, displays abstract symbols representing the sounds made by each speaker over time.
You’ll need to see it in action to understand it, but in essence, the Visiphone is a glass half-dome that fits over a small video projector. When someone speaks, a colored circle shows up at the center of the dome, with the size of the circle representing the volume of the speech. As the conversation progresses, the original circle slowly spirals out to the edge of the dome, replaced by new circles at the center.
The researchers call the device an experiment in the “social and aesthetic aspects of visualizations of sound,” with the goal of enhancing each speaker’s awareness of the other and, in a sense, allowing people calling across long distances to keep each other company. At the moment the Visiphone is more akin to a modern art installation or a science-museum display than a practical tool–but then again, building sometimes-wacky prototypes that stimulate original thinking about the technologies around us is where the Media Lab excels.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.