Accomplishments
The MPEG-4 SA project developed at the Media Lab made structured audio a practical reality and the Aspen Movie Map was the precursor to the ideas in Google Street View.
Large numbers of Media Lab-developed technologies made it into products, such as the LEGO Mindstorms and the LEGO WeDo and the pointing stick in IBM laptops, the Benton hologram used in most credit cards, the Fisher-Price's Symphony Painter, the Nortel Wireless Mesh Network, the NTT Comware Sensetable, the Taito’s Karaoke-on-Demand Machine.
In 2001, MIT Media Lab collaborated to create two spin-offs: Media Lab Asia and Media Lab Europe. Media Lab Asia, based in India, was a result of cooperation with the Government of India but eventually broke off in 2003 after disagreement. Media Lab Europe, based in Dublin, Ireland, was founded with a similar concept in association with Irish universities and government. Media Lab Europe closed in January 2005.
Created collaboratively by the Computer Museum and the Media Lab, the Computer Clubhouse, a worldwide network of after-school learning centers, focuses on youth from underserved communities who would not otherwise have access to technological tools and activities.
In January 2005, the Lab's chairman emeritus Nicholas Negroponte announced at the World Economic Forum a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop computer, a technology that could revolutionize how the world's children are educated. A non-profit organization, One Laptop per Child, was created to oversee the actual deployment, i.e., MIT will not manufacture or distribute the device.
The Synthetic Neurobiology group created reagents and devices for the analysis of brain circuits are in use by hundreds of biology labs around the world.
In 2011, Ramesh Raskar's group published their femto-photography technique, that is able to image the movement of individual light pulses.
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