This past weekend, architects and engineers from the MIT SENSEable City Lab unveiled EyeStop – the bus station of tomorrow – at the Genio Fiorentino festival in Florence. The prototype was designed in collaboration with the Province of Florence and the local public transportation authority ATAF.

"The EyeStop could change the whole experience of urban travel," explains Carlo Ratti, head of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT. "One touch of the finger and passengers can get the shortest bus route to their destination or the position of all the buses in the city. The EyeStop will also glow at different levels of intensity to signal the distance of an approaching bus."

Partially covered with touch-sensitive e-INK and screens, the EyeStop features a variety of interactive services, allowing users to surf the Web, use their mobile devices as an interface with the bus shelter, post ads and community announcements to the electronic bulletin board and even monitor their real-time exposure to pollutants. The EyeStop acts as an "active environmental sensing node." This allows it to power itself through sunlight and collect real-time information about the surrounding environment.

"EyeStop is like an 'info-tape' that snakes through the city," says project leader Giovanni de Niederhousern. "It senses information about the environment and distributes it in a form accessible to all citizens."

According to Ratti, the bus stop was built off the developing interplay between a city's physical form and its citizens. "Today's technologies are adding new possibilities to that age-long relationship, thanks to the addition of digital information to physical space."

A more formal prototype of EyeStop will be unveiled in October.