Karrie Karahalios and her colleagues of the MIT Media Lab have created a device that adds a visual ingredient to phone conversations.

The Visiphonedisplays abstract symbols representing the sounds made by each speaker over time.

This glass dome fits over a small video projector. When someone speaks, a colored circle shows up at the center of the dome, with the size of the circle representing the volume of the speech. As the conversation progresses, the original circle slowly spirals out to the edge of the dome, replaced by new circles at the center.

This experiment in the “social and aesthetic aspects of visualizations of sound,” aims at enhancing each speaker’s awareness of the other.

At the moment the Visiphone is more akin to a modern art installation than an everyday tool, but building sometimes-wacky prototypes that stimulate original thinking about the technologies around us is where the Media Lab excels.
Video.

Via Technology Review Weblog.