Scott Fisher

Technology Review: The Future of The Web

Jonathan Abrams Founder of Socialzr and Friendster; San Francisco, CA:

"In five to ten years, we will all have chips in our brains. When you look at someone's face on the street, your Google Brain software will automatically call up every embarrassing photo of them from ancient websites such as Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace; list all mutual friends; and remind you of the person's annotated bio. As a response to the perceived slowness and verbosity of antiquated services like Twitter, people will send everyone they know nanobursts of information about anything they might do or think before they actually do or think it. Every website, blog, and social-networking profile will include an aggregated feed from every other website, blog, and social-networking service, resulting in an exponential and infinite length of repeated content on every possible site, overloading our brain chips and causing frequent nosebleeds and occasional cerebral hemorrhage."

Posted by Scott Fisher at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Posted on Engadget:

"It looks like Motorola isn't about to let Apple have the goofy, non-existent product spotlight to itself, with a recent patent application of its revealing some plans of its own for a head-mounted display."

Motorola patent application reveals cellphone / HMD combo craziness - Engadget

Posted by Scott Fisher at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Next version of the ZML, we need a bunch of these roaming around...
Video here.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Piece from a new show of work by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer opening soon in Germany:

In >Pulse Room<, exhibition visitors' heartbeats are transmitted to 100 lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling. The interface, a simple metal handle, transmits a visitor*s pulse to a lightbulb after ten seconds. If another visitor touches the handle, his pulse is transmitted to the first lightbulb and the rhythm of its predecessor is transmitted to the next lightbulb in the series - thus the digital traces left by 100 visitors are permanently present in the exhibition in this poetic installation.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Technology Review:

Hundred-dollar laptop, revisited: The next-generation version of the One Laptop per Child machine will dispense with keypads. It can be folded flat to make one larger screen (left); here, two children could play a game, each using the touch-screen capability. Or it can be held on its side and used as an electronic book (right).
Credit: One Laptop per Child

Posted by Scott Fisher at 6:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Time: Wednesday, April 30, 6-9pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Featuring Spring Semester Class Projects from :
- CTIN 485L Advanced Game Development - Brinson
- CTIN 544 Experiments in Interactivity (Hoberman)
- CTIN 463 Anatomy of a Game (Hight)
- CTIN 405 Design and Technology for Mobile (Bleecker)
- CTIN 406 Sound Design for Games ­(Diamante)
- CTIN 488 Game Design Workshop (Swain/Arey/Diamante)
- CTIN 484/489 Intermediate Game Design (Brinson & Fullerton)
- CTIN 491 Advanced Game Project ( Swain)
- CTIN 492 Experimental Game Topics (Bleecker)
- CTIN 544 Experiments in Interactivity( Production 1) (Kratky)
- CTIN 542 Interactive Experience Design (Bolas)
- CTIN 590 Directed Research - Fisher

and more....

Food and Drink will be provided starting at 5:45.

***SCHEDULE below*****

Continue reading "IMD Forum for 4/30/08: IMD Project Presentations" »

Posted by Scott Fisher at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just got word that Tracy is now Associate Professor of Interactive Media with tenure.
Congratulations Tracy!!

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

And speaking of Professor Fullerton...check out:
"School of Thought: USC - At USC interactive media division, students make small games with big ideas." A good article on Winterbottom, the GIL, and our game curriculum on GAMETAP. Some nice words about IMD as well (but not so sure about the "thanks to the efforts of a few old virtual reality tech heads who founded the department...").

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Speakers: Zied Rieke, Infinity Ward
Time: Wednesday, April 16, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Overview: Infinity Ward design and philosophy.
Question and answer session discussing anything and everything related to designing and developing games and what little Zied knows about that. Confusing and rambling explanations are supplemented by in game and in-tool demonstrations.

Bio: Zied Rieke is a 10 year industry veteran and was Lead Designer on Call of Duty 1, 2 and 4. Before that he worked on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and some stuff you hopefully have never heard of. Co-author of the Game Developer Call of Duty 4 Post-Mortem, he once visited USC to drop off his sister at a Dave Mathews concert.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speakers: Mk Haley, Jill Smolin, and Josh Grow, SIGGRAPH 2008 committee members
Time: Wednesday, April 9, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

This week the CTAN 522 John C Hench Animation & Digital Arts Seminar combines forces with the CTIN 511 Interactive Media Seminar. Our visiting speakers will be three of the committee members for SIGGRAPH 2008 here in LA: Mk Haley, Jill Smolin, and Josh Grow. Jill represents the Animation Festival, Josh represents the Student Volunteer Program, and Mk represents the Interactive Installations. They will talk about the SIGGRAPH conference itself, as well as provide some examples of student submitted work, and a discussion related to how to best submit your work for consideration.

ACM SIGGRAPH's mission is to promote the generation and dissemination of information on computer graphics and interactive techniques and to foster a membership community whose core values help them to catalyze the innovation and application of computer graphics and interactive techniques. Some highlights of the annual conference are its Animation Theater and Electronic Theater presentations, where recently created CG films are played, and an installation of Emerging Technologies that showcases recent work from the crossroads of science, art, and technology and celebrates the best in creativity and innovation from the past year. Dozens of research papers are presented each year, and SIGGRAPH is widely considered the most prestigious forum for the publication of computer graphics research. In addition to the papers, there are numerous panels of industry experts set up to discuss a wide variety of topics, from computer graphics to machine interactivity to education. This year, the conference is also co-located with the 3rd annual Sandbox Videogame Symposium.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)