The Second Annual Conference of the Entertainment Software and Cognitive Neurotherapeutics Society ( ESCONS) was hosted by the USC School of Cinematic Arts on March 15-17, 2013 in Los Angeles, CA. We are proud to report that CM&BHC students and alumni were omnipresent at this venue, which was attended by over 230 people from academia, industry and [...]

IMD student, Xuan “Sean” Li’s Blowing Blues, an interactive health application, won the “top software demo” award at the Entertainment Software and Cognitive Neurotherapeutics Society ( ESCoNS) conference. Developed as part of an MFA Thesis at the USC Interactive Media Division, the game helps players improve their resilience to life’s stresses and worries. Using an innovative interaction [...]

Mark Bolas’ MxR team was presenting the OTSVR (Off The Shelf Virtual Reality) workshop at the IEEE VR conference this weekend and the blogosphere picked up on the efforts and has been posting about the Lab’s designs.  Here are some of the headlines: Slashdot: The University of Southern California has launched a website that contains the [...]

A list of just a few of the things the MxR team and our friends and partners have going on at this year’s IEEE VR Conference: Saturday, 3/16 Workshop: OTSVR: The Workshop on Off-The-Shelf Virtual Reality   Saturday, 3/16 3DUI – Paper presentation – FlexibleSpaces: Dynamic Layout Generation for Infinite Walking in Virtual Environments | Khrystyna Vasylevska, Hannes [...]

ICT offers select interdisciplinary paid internships for creative and technical students wishing to pursue careers in simulation, interactive media and virtual reality fields. ICT aims to create compelling immersive systems for effective learning for military, entertainment and educational purposes.

For more info and program requirements:

http://ict.usc.edu/academics/internships/

MxR Studio is sponsoring a 1-day PhaseSpace Motion Capture Tutorial Learn the PhaseSpace motion capture process using patented Active LED technology and real-time processing that eliminates marker-swapping and significantly reduces drop-outs. Where:     MxR Lab 5318 McConnell Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90066 When:    11:00AM – 5:00PM Thursday, Feb. 21st Details:     Full Day Tutorial with a [...]

We were all thrilled to see Palmer Luckey’s, Oculus Rift HMD included in Huffington Post’s Tech roundup, “Best Inventions of 2012”. The low-cost, wide field-of-view head mount is part of a growing family of virtual reality tools initiated with the open source immersive designs of the MxR Lab.

Project Holodeck provided a compelling demo of their game, “Wild Skies” at The GAME: Next Exhibition at the Science Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin. They play tested with hundreds of patrons and got some fantastic user feedback! The team has been hard at work for five months, and we are happy to hear how excited people [...]

Journalist/filmmaker Nonny de la Peña made Co.Create’s list of people who made 2012 more creative. Highlighting De la Peña’s interactive journalism using game software, motion tracking, and a head-mounted virtual reality display to create an experience that allowed people to witness a real event that took place in a food line in L.A. De la Peña is helping [...]

Mark Bolas, Perry Hoberman and the team at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC brought attendees of SIGGRAPH to the red planet.  Well, at least they provided an immersive Virtual Reality based experience where people could traverse the surface of the Gale Crater, the site where the Curiosity Rover [...]

A goal of the MxR lab is to broadly disseminate its research. While the promise of personalized immersive virtual reality has been on the horizon for more than 20 years, the FOV2GO project has been publishing open source designs for ways to make it low cost and broadly available. Today, the bold actions of one entrepreneurial former [...]

Palmer Luckey is a designer at Mark Bolas’ MxR lab and is about to launch a kickstarter project at OculusVR to create a custom version of the lab’s open-source head mounted display designs FOV2FGO to work with popular PC games John Carmack has embraced the design and the result was declared among the “5 favorite highlights from E3″ CNN. Further [...]

MxR Lab alumni Edmond Yee and Josh Joiner’s Combiform, a novel digital gaming console featuring four combinable handheld controllers won best student game at 2012 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international conference on human-computer interaction. http://chi2012.acm.org/index.shtml Combiform provides a new and unique tangible gaming interface that stresses the importance [...]

The MxR Lab is having a substantial presence at the ongoing 2012 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the premier international conference on human-computer interaction. http://chi2012.acm.org/index.shtml Evan Suma and Mark Bolas are taking part in the GESTURES IN 3D SPACE as part of the 3rd Dimension of CHI (3DCHI): Touching and Designing [...]

Congratulations to Joel Jurik and co-authors Andrew Jones, Mark Bolas and Paul Debevec on receiving the best paper award for their paper, “Prototyping a Light Field Display Involving Direct Observation of a Video Projector Array” at the IEEE Procams 2011 Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado.