Connecting With A Restored Wetland Via A Large-Scale Multimodal Sensor Deployment

Starting a decade ago, the Responsive Environments Group at the MIT Media Lab began to develop and deploy different types of sensors in a soon-to-be-retired cranberry bog in Plymouth MA. This grew into the backbone of the Tidmarsh Living Observatory, which streams data from over a hundred diverse sensors at what is now a MA Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary. This talk will overview the sensor infrastructure and describe several applications that we have built atop it that include machine learning for real-time wildlife identification, manifestation and interpretation of the data in a virtual ‘Digital Twin’ avatar landscape, dynamically separating audio from a dispersed microphone array into localized foreground and background representations, and new ’sensory enhancing' interfaces designed to augment the visitor experience.