Our society's modalities of communication are rapidly changing. Large panel displays and screens are be ing installed in many public spaces, ranging from open plazas, to shopping malls, to private houses, to theater stages, classrooms, and museums. In parallel, wearable computers are transforming our technological landscape by reshaping the heavy, bulky desktop computer into a light weight, portable device that is accessible to people at any time. Computation and sensing are moving from computers and devices into the environment itself. The space around us is instrumented with sensors and displays, and it tends to reflect adiffused need to combine together the information space with our physical space. This combination of large public and miniature personal digital displays together with distributed computing and sensing intelligence offers unprecedented opportunities to merge the virtual and the real, the information landscape of the Internet with the urban landscape of the city, to transform digital animated media in story tellers, in public installations and through personal wearable technology. This paper describes technological platforms built at the MIT Media Lab, through 1994-2002, that contribute to defining new trends in architecture that merge virtual and real spaces, and are reshaping the way we live and experience the museum, the house, the theater, and the modern city
