It's a place where adults get to play with toys. The violins are wired, the silver stitching on the Levi's jacket acts as a keyboard, the pink juggling pins have sensors so they make music as they whirl and, oh yes, those plastic bread buns with forks stuck in them are really control pads. A visit to MIT Media Lab is like walking through an interactive science museum, only more fun.

Meet Mr Java, the coffeemaker that knows all about you. Put in your mug (with microchip embedded) and it will greet you by name, add that extra milk to your cafe latte (just the way you like it) and turn the radio on to your favourite station so you can relax during your coffee break.

The brain behind Mr Java is Joseph Kaye, who is now working on a smart kitchen: weigh out a cup of flour on the counter and it will deduct from the contents of that bag and remind you when to re-order. Joseph did an undergraduate degree in brain and cognitive science and says no other institution in the world would have entertained his proposal to make a smart coffeemaker. MIT Media Lab positively encouraged him. "You're allowed to do things other people would think are crazy. You're not locked into a particular project. There's a freedom to the lab. There's a very strong drive to create and explore - it's exciting, but it's also exhausting." Leaning on crutches, and wearing what looks like a long green-and-white checked skirt or sarong, his ponytail cascading down his back, he has no trace of irony in his voice as he says MIT has some astonishingly nerdy people.

So, it's back to the microwave which can cook your French toast while amusing you with anecdotes in a French chef's accent.

MIT Media Lab is probably best known to the world for its zanier offerings. It is a place where scientists, artists, musicians, composers, physicists, psychologists, engineers and others converge in a bid to design the digital world of the future.

The director of the lab and fearless advocate of the digital age, Nicholas Negroponte, has written that in the same way that "we reach out to touch someone, we will find ourselves using voice to project our desires to machines . . . speech and delegation are tightly coupled. Will you be issuing orders to the seven dwarfs? Possibly. The idea that 20 years from now you will talking to a group of eight inch-high holographic assistants is not far-fetched. What is certain is that voice will be your primary channel of communication between you and your interface agents." As to computers, he says computing corduroy, memory muslin, and solar silk might be the literal fabric of tomorrow's digital dress. "Instead of carrying your computer, you could be wearing it . . . computer retailing of equipment and supplies may not be limited to Radio Shack and Staples, but include the likes of Saks and stores that sell products from Nike, Levi's and Banana Republic.

"In the further future, computer displays may be sold by the gallon and painted on, CD-ROMs may be edible and parallel processors may be applied like suntan lotion. Alternatively, we might be living in our computers."

He wrote that in 1995, in his bestselling book Being Digital. He grins as he says he now thinks he was too conservative in many of his projections. "Who would have thought a billion people would be using e-commerce, with a turnover of a trillion dollars?"

Projects in the lab are grouped into three main areas: "digital life", "news in the future" and "things that think". Digital life looks at the interconnection between bits (the computer ones), people and things in an online world. News in the future looks at news for computers, consumer behaviour, interfaces and application. Things that think explores ways of moving computation beyond the traditional desktops and laptops into objects such as toasters, doorknobs or shoes.

Computers and telephones can't transmit touch and feel, only voice and occasionally video. Upstairs in Media Lab, you can run your hand over a set of wooden rollers, the handset for a "tangible telephone". The receiver is also a set of rollers, so you and whoever you are communicating with are interacting with what is, in essence, a shared physical object. It transmits a physical sense of a person in the same way a handshake does, explains Alexandra Kahn, the lab's press liaison.

In the same lab, a set of glass bottles are bathed in a beautiful blue light. Take out one stopper and birdsong fills the air. Remove another and musical notes flood the room. The bottles have wires wound around their necks and these interface with a computer.

And why? To demonstrate that common objects can act as aesthetically beautiful interfaces.

The personal information architecture group is looking at portable health monitoring. A device could be used to give information about your physical wellbeing - constantly monitoring your cholesterol, blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate. If it incorporated a Global Satellite Positioning system, it could also be used to track mountaineers. Open another door and, while a cello plays in the background, look at the famous denim jacket with its stitching which transmits pressure in the same way a keyboard does. Others in the group, which includes a composer, are developing musical toys for children. There's a beautiful red squeezeball with silver spirals of conductive thread.

And what about a playpen full of balls with sensors connected to a musical system?

Then there's musical playdoh. The movement of the salt and water molecules can be tracked. As the clay moves, the music is activated.

In the machine listening group, F Joseph Pompei is working on an audio spotlight which focuses sound in a particular area. Alexandra Kahn says other colleges rejected his project as a physical impossibility, but in Media Lab he was encouraged to try. "People are given the leeway to try crazy ideas. If it doesn't work something else will come from it. There is isn't the same inhibiting fear of failure you might find in many corporate and academic environments."

So sit back and think of 2005, when you'll sip that cafe latte and talk to your doorknob, while those dwarfs dance on your desk to a tune you have previously composed on your jacket.