What is Joi Ito's Lab?

What is Joi Ito's Lab like?

Joi Ito's Lab is a laboratory to explore, research and experiment
to seek the future of the web.

The lab is open, various projects and members
are coming in and out of the lab based on project basis.

Physically we have an office in Tokyo,
but most of the communication are done online.

This is our office in Tokyo.


Photo CC-BY-NC-SA Fumi Yamazaki


And a bunch of servers...


Photo CC-BY-NC-SA Fumi Yamazaki


The lab is unique in that we don't actually employ researchers,
but it's fairly open and people who wants to do some research uses our infrastructure,
research results are basically going to be open to the public.

Infrastructure-wise, we have 1Gbps dark fiber,
servers, Secondlife island, Asterisk, streaming server etc.


...I received a question of what projects we are actually doing here,
so in my future posts I will explain some of those projects.

But to give you a brief idea of some examples,
we have a SecondLife island called "Kula" where people are building various projects
(Creative Commons, Magnatune, Mozilla24 etc have their projects here)

Our streaming server is used to stream various conferences including
iCommons Summit 2007, The New Context Conference 2007, etc,

We went to Ars Electronica2007 to present an interactive art called "MOGA"
with the "team CCMIX" which consists of Keio Univ. Ubiquitous Cinema Lab,
Joshibi Univ. of Art and Design, and our lab.

You can see a video of MOGA here:





Joi Ito's Labでは、webの未来、もしくは新しくて面白い物を求めて
色々なプロジェクトを立ち上げています。

基本的にオープンで、研究員は抱えない。
そのかわり、色々な人に場を提供し、研究成果もオープンにするという
ちょっと変わったラボです。

設備的には、ダークファイバー(1Gbps)が入り、サーバやセカンドライフの島、
Asterisk（IP電話）やストリーミングサーバなどが使える環境を整えており、
それらを使って、興味がある人が色々なプロジェクトを立ち上げています。

今後、このブログではそれらのプロジェクトの紹介をしていきたいと思います。