Developed by Jaewoo Chung at MIT's Media Lab, Guiding Light consists of a wearable badge with magnetic sensors and a software app that makes use of a projector built into many Samsung smartphones to cast arrows onto the ground in front of you as you walk.

The system relies on a map of the building based on fluctuations in its magnetic field, created by the presence of steel in the walls, floor and ceiling. In tests, Guiding Light was able to determine a user's position to within a metre. — newscientist.com

Architect, engineer, and director of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carlo Ratti will focus on (you guessed it) the Senseable City—merging the digital and the physical realms by understanding how we sense and act on our built environment, and how the latter then responds to us. — blog.bmwguggenheimlab.org

Haifa-born Oxman, 35, one of the world's leading researchers in the field of digital architecture, is currently studying how our bones are affected by environmental conditions and by the weight that is brought to bear on them, and how such knowledge can be applied in other areas of life. It is known, for instance, that astronauts in outer space lose bone mass because of the absence of gravity, whereas women when they are pregnant develop stronger bones in order to withstand the added load. — haaretz.com

Sanergy, a year-old for-profit social enterprise that manufactures high-quality, yet low-cost and compact toilets for urban slums in the developing world and then uses human waste to produce energy and fertilizer. It is an “affordable, accessible and hygienic sanitation” solution for millions that live in places without sewage or electricity. They are places where the street is the bathroom. And that’s precisely the problem. — blogs.forbes.com

Welcome to the Immersive Cocoon, a surround display dome with sophisticated motion sensor technology that inspired the technology depicted in 'Minority Report'. Now your body becomes the interface, as you are enveloped and your body movement becomes part of this digital environment to make our everyday lives more enjoyable, at least that is what this conceptual project tries to explore. — yatzer.com

Some were invented at MIT. Others were simply inspired by time spent at MIT. But all of them (well, maybe not #150) have had a profound impact, in one way or another, on society, culture, politics, economics, transportation, health, science, and, oh yes, technology. — The Boston Globe

Joichi Ito initially thought he wouldn’t be a good fit for MIT.

Ito is the new director of the MIT Media Lab, known as a hub of innovation; technologies created there have turned into products such as Guitar Hero and the Amazon Kindle...

WBUR’s All Things Considered host Sacha Pfeiffer toured the Media Lab with Ito on his first day at work recently and asked him about his early reservations about his new job. — wbur.org

On Tuesday, the university plans to announce that Joichi Ito, known as Joi, will become the fourth director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, which was originally founded by the architect Nicholas Negroponte in 1985 and has since become recognized for its willingness to take risks in developing technologies that are at the edge of the computing frontier. — New York Times