

For all the ways the influx of new devices has streamlined our harried lives, it’s produced a parallel problem: the fracturing of our digital ones. What happens on your phone or tablet or computer are siloed experiences that rarely overlap in any meaningful or helpful way. But just think, what if your devices could interact with each other so seamlessly that one screen essentially becomes the other?

This scenario is inching closer to reality with THAW, the newest project out of MIT’s Media Lab. THAW is a program that allows your smartphone and desktop computer to interact with each other so fluidly it’s as though they share the same silicon brain. In the video you watch as files are dragged from a desktop computer and dumped onto an iPhone. In another scene you see a Mario-like video game being played on the desktop only to transfer to the iPhone without skipping a beat. It’s totally trippy, and a little bit surprising. Which is weird because interaction like this is about as intuitive as it comes.

THAW is the product of a collaboration between Sang-won Leigh and Philipp Schoessler, both students out of MIT’s Media Lab (Leigh is from the Fluid Interfaces Group and Schoessler is out of the Tangible Media Group, which produced a shape-shifting tabletop earlier this year). The exploration into THAW began after the team started wondering how just how harmonious our digital interactions could become. “We own multiple devices—we have a phone, we have a laptop, now everyone is going to have a watch,” says Schoessler. “We think they need to be ways to more seamlessly integrate everything.

The technology behind THAW is straightforward. The software overlays a rainbow colored grid on your computer screen, and using the iPhone’s back-facing camera, the phone is able to detect what area of the monitor it’s hovering over. The two devices connect wirelessly and transfer information back and forth to communication position. “We’re displaying the pattern only behind where the phone’s camera is looking; it’s like a peep hole you can see through,” explains Leigh. “When you move the phone around, the peep hole follows your position and the phone can see the color pattern through the peep hole.”

In some ways, THAW is a lot like Bump, the now-defunct app that let you share files, photos and contact information by bumping phones together. But THAW's potential extends beyond simply transferring information; it turns immaterial digital data into something tangible, something that can be manipulated with your hands. You see a good example of this in the video, when Leigh turns his phone into a stepping box for the tiny polar bear avatar in the video game he developed. Faced with an insurmountable task of reaching a new platform, the polar bear uses the iPhone as a stepping ladder, hopping higher and higher as Leigh raises the iPhone.

Despite its wow-factor, the guys have no plans to commercialize the software. In fact, they say they’re leaning towards making it open source, if only to see what other applications can come out of it. “We don’t really think of it as a product,” says Schoessler. “We’ve really just touched the surface of the applications—I think it would be nice to see what other people might come up with.”