MIT Mobile Experience Lab

Making SMS Work For You -- Building SMS Actions for Drupal

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Mon, 08/18/2008 - 12:57

At the MIT Mobile Experience Lab, we are doing a lot of interesting projects to connect people more with the places they visit, the people they know (or don't know), and information, with an emphasis on helping people while they are mobile. Since an increasing number of mobile people carry mobiles, a lot of my work has been working on ways to create connection by using a cellphone.

Lately in particular I have been working with SMS. The SMS Framework for Drupal is pretty awesome, but we needed better two-way communication. We aren't trying to just let people post to a Drupal site via SMS, we needed to be able to send commands to Drupal via SMS to trigger activity in the site and receive feedback.

I drew a lot of the design for my SMS actions from my experience working with the Services module and it functions in a very similar way. Contrib modules register their own actions (keywords which are triggered off the first word of an incoming SMS) and specify callback methods for those actions. The callbacks then process the text and can fire back responses to the user or simply just perform some action in the system.

Busy Summer

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 09:28

Steve and I have been insanely busy this summer so far and so we've been very quiet here lately. We are going to try to change that with some posts about what all we've been up to (when we can talk about it).

We have both been neck-deep in Drupal for the past several months. Most recently, I've been writing some custom modules and working on integration with the SMS Framework module to build a really awesome prototype system for a project here at the MIT Mobile Experience Lab. We'll be running our prototype tests later on this summer and I'll write more about what we're doing then.

The Cloud - Fiber Optic Interactive Sculpture Opens in Florence, Italy

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Thu, 06/19/2008 - 14:13

A few days ago in Florence, Italy, the MIT Mobile Experience Lab unveiled our newest project -- The Cloud, a large scale interactive sculpture, for the Pitti Immagine fashion tradeshow.

From The Cloud's website:

An organic sculptural landmark that responds to human interaction and expresses context awareness using hundreds of sensors and over 15,000 individually addressable optical fibers. Constructed of carbon glass, spanning over four meters, and containing more than 65 kilometers of fiber optics, the Cloud encourages visitors to touch and interact with information in new ways, manifesting emotions and behavior through sound and a dichotomy of luminescence and darkness.

And be sure check out the video created for the opening after the jump!

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