IN BRIEF

I am a Ph.D. student in the Speech and Mobility group with Chris Schmandt at the MIT Media Lab. I worked in the Sociable Media Group from 2006-2008. I'm interested in designing, building, and studying systems for technology mediated sociality.

You can reach me at dharry@media.mit.edu. My office is E15-320G. See also, my (joint) blog, my del.icio.us, my last.fm, my twitter.

PAPERS / PRESS / PRESENTATIONS

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Recent

Drew Harry. Information Spaces. Part of Experimental Graphical Chat Spaces in Connections, an MIT Museum Exhibit. Showing until September 2009.
Drew Harry, Joshua Green, Judith Donath. "backchan.nl: Integrating Backchannels in Physical Space." In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009) (Boston, MA)
Drew Harry. "Algorithmic Architecture & Why People Build Houses in Second Life" Social Computing Symposium. October 2008, Redmond, WA.
Drew Harry. "Algorithmic Architecture in Virtual Worlds." (MS Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008).
Drew Harry, Dietmar Offenhuber, Orkan Telhan, Judith Donath. Stiff People's League. In Homo Ludens Ludens. LABoral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial, Gijon, Spain. April-September 2008.
Drew Harry, Judith Donath. "Information Spaces - Building Meeting Rooms in Virtual Environments" (Works in Progress) In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008) (Florence, Italy).

All

Drew Harry, Dan Gutierrez, Joshua Green, Judith Donath. "backchan.nl - Integrating Backchannels With Physical Space." (Works in Progress) In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008) (Florence, Italy).
Drew Harry, Dietmar Offenhuber, Judith Donath. Function Follows Form —The Social Roles of Virtual Architecture in Architecture’s Second Life, S. Doesinger, Editor. 2007, Prestel.
The Stiff People's League debuted at the Ars Electronica Festival as part of an invited exhibition about Second Life. More info.
"The Projects - towards a sociable architecture for virtual worlds." Drew Harry, Dietmar Offenhuber. Design of User Experience, 2007.
"Unreal Meetings", Erica Naone. Technology Review, 11 July 2007.
A time to glance: Studying the use of mobile ambient information. Frank Bentley, Joe Tullio, Crysta Metcalf, Drew Harry, Noel Massey. Pervasive 2007 Workshop on the Design and Evaluation of Ambient Information Systems. May, 2007.

CONCH

In this project, we explore how a new currency for conversation might be added to audio conferences to provide a new channel for non-verbal communication.

REALITY PORTALS

A virtual world application that uses physical embedded sensor nodes with cameras and displays as portals between the real and virtual world. In collaboration with the Responsive Environments Group here at the Lab.

*SPACE

I've finished my thesis! Check it out here (24 Mb). It includes an extended discussion of *space as well as Information Spaces. My thesis also includes a broad theoretical discussion about the differences between virtual and physical spaces.

BACKCHAN.NL

A web-based system for facilitating question asking and answering in conference situations. By putting question-asking on the web, it allows a remote audience to participate in the same way that the local audience does. Read more in our CHI paper. (slides)

With Joshua Green and Dan Gutierrez.

STIFF PEOPLE'S LEAGUE

A mixed reality table soccer game in which teams of virtual and real players compete. Debuted at Ars Electronica 2007. Read an overview here or view photos here. To appear in Homo Ludens Ludens in Gijon, Spain.

With Dietmar Offenhuber and Orkan Telhan.
Video: (small, med, large)

INFORMATION SPACES

In this three dimensional social space, we use the design of the meeting space itself to give participants a vocabulary for responding to the meeting as well as a technique for visualizing the history of the meeting itself. Read more in our CHI paper.

INFORMATION AVATARS

I created an avatar that slowly grows out to connect with other avatars around it. Over time, these avatars' colors shift and change to become more like the colors of people near them, visualizing their relationships.'

THE PROJECTS

We propose an extensible cellular building structure that provides people with a space to work, play, and socialize. We also describe a set of "social utilities" to support effective navigation, self expression, and visualization.

With Dietmar Offenhuber.

TUG AND TALK

The Tug and Talk device sits on your belt and connects to your shirt. Another Tug and Talk user can tug on the chain coming out of their matching belt and their tugging pattern is replicated as a tug on your own shirt. Presented at alt.chi 2007.

With Matt Adcock, Matt Boch, Vanessa Harden, and Retro Poblano.

SOUSREALITY

"Sousreality" is a pair of connected spaces linked through the metaphor of a crystal ball. In the SIGGRAPH gallery is a crystal ball that peers into Second Life, and in Second Life there is a crystal sphere containing a real-time inside-out vision of the gallery.

With Dietmar Offenhuber and Orkan Telhan.

CHATTERPRINT

Chatterprint is a concept for a sharable visualization that describes the history of a single person's online life through a variety of media including like instant messaging, online forums and social networking sites. By combining a range of different sources, I hope to capture the rhythms and patterns of online life in a way that people feel creates a meaningful self-portrait that they would want to share with others.

BRIDGING WORLDS

An ethnography of World of Warcraft players, studying how relationships move between the real and virtual worlds. This work refutes the common misconception that virtual worlds are meritocratic spaces.

My humanities thesis while at Olin College.

TREE FLOW

A visualization technique for illustrating changes of tree data structures over time, for instance the organizational chart of a company.

With Martin Wattenberg while at IBM Research in Cambridge.

K-CLIQUE REDUCTION

A visualization technique for reducing the complexity of graph visualizations. Uses a fast heuristic to identify complete subgraphs and represents those subgraphs as visually distinct nodes. This system also describes a method for "eroding" nodes at the periphery of the graph to simplify the final representation.

With Dan Lindquist while at Olin College.