The hands-free nature of the device is particularly attractive to the police and military. That's a technology the Media Lab helped perfect. When academia or industry get on board it's time for us to get off. The lab is itself at least as important as anything it produces. This is widely regarded as the lunatic fringe of the digital age, a center of computing prowess so alluring that not only are engineering and physics students drawn here, but an equal number of artists, musicians and humanities students who come to get their master's degrees and doctorates in Media Arts and Sciences.
Critics are hard to find.
The Wiesner Building, designed by I.M. Pei, contains a lobby used mostly for display space above which rises a three-story central atrium. The lower lobby houses the physics department and the only two classrooms in the building. The remaining three floors are tightly packed with administrative space, laboratories and offices. The exterior and interior atrium are coated in a metallic sheen, not unlike a lavatory stall. Although there has been little change in the lab itself in the past dozen years, some say a strikingly different type of student is being drawn here.