Gemstones like precious opal are beautiful to look at and deceivingly complex. As you look at such gems from different angles, you’ll see a variety of tints glisten, causing you to question what color the rock actually is. It’s iridescent thanks to something called structural color — microscopic structures that reflect light to produce radiant hues.

MIT researchers have developed a new method for designing 3D structures that can be transformed from a flat configuration into their curved, fully formed shape with only a single pull of a string.

Coding with large language models (LLMs) holds huge promise, but it also exposes some long-standing flaws in software: code that’s messy, hard to change safely, and often opaque about what’s really happening under the hood. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are charting a more “modular” path ahead. 

The degree to which someone trusts the information depicted in a chart can depend on their assumptions about who made the data visualization, according to a pair of studies by MIT researchers.

It’s hard to keep up with the ever-changing trends of the fashion world. What’s “in” one minute is often out of style the next season, potentially causing you to re-evaluate your wardrobe.

Say a person takes their French Bulldog, Bowser, to the dog park. Identifying Bowser as he plays among the other canines is easy for the dog-owner to do while onsite.

Say a local concert venue wants to engage its community by giving social media followers an easy way to share and comment on new music from emerging artists. Rather than working within the constraints of existing social platforms, the venue might want to create its own social app with the functionality that would be best for its community. But building a new social app from scratch involves many complicated programming steps, and even if the venue can create a customized app, the organization’s followers may be unwilling to join the new platform because it could mean leaving their connections and data behind.

In 1968, MIT Professor Stephen Benton transformed holography by making three-dimensional images viewable under white light. Over fifty years later, holography’s legacy is inspiring new directions at MIT CSAIL, where the Human-Computer Interaction Engineering (HCIE) group, led by Professor Stefanie Mueller, is pioneering programmable color — a future in which light and material appearance can be dynamically controlled.