The Broadercasting special interest group at the MIT Media Laboratory examines the implications and opportunities presented by the powerful combination of digital transmission and distributed computational intelligence. It merges ongoing activities in the Digital Life, News in the Future, and Things That Think programs with a menu of cohesive new initiatives. The creator of a responsive media document is generating not just the document but also a set of adaptive behaviors, which might be said to send a little of the creator along with the presentation.
Research also addresses the ability to create synthetic characters with responsive behaviors.
The best sorts of responsiveness are enabled by an object-based representation of media. We add such things as kitchen appliances, autos, and toys as destinations. Even devices that play the role of traditional screens and speakers will be physically very different from the output devices to which we're accustomed, and work on developing new output devices will coordinate with work on authoring of content that can take advantage of the new capabilities. On the World Wide Web, anyone can be a publisher. The millions of personal Web pages haven't eliminated the role of the thousands of traditional information sources, but rather have created an environment of technical innovation and expressive creativity that benefits everyone.