Scott Fisher

Title: "'The End of Cartoons' - Capturing Reality for Games, News and More, or: the Reinvention of Photography (Again)"
Speaker: Adam Clayton Powell III
Time: Wednesday, March 29, 2006, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Biography: Adam Clayton Powell III is Director of the Integrated Media Systems Center, the U.S. national Engineering Research Center for multimedia, at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He is also a Visiting Professor at the USC Annenberg School and a Senior Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.

Powell came to USC in 2003 from Howard University's WHUT-TV, where he served as general manager of the broadcast and cable television channels. After joining the USC faculty, Powell was asked to provide weekly media reports for WHUT-TV, which ran on Friday and Sunday nights in 2003-2004 and which won the 2004 award for Best Network and Major Market TV Commentary from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Before 2001, Powell served as Vice President/Technology and Programs for the Freedom Forum. In his 15 years at the Freedom Forum, Powell developed and supervised new media conferences and seminars and training programs on Internet- and computer-based media and information technology for journalists, educators, policy makers, and researchers in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. He was also an executive producer at Quincy Jones Entertainment where he produced Jesse Jackson's weekly television series, and served as vice president for news and information programming at National Public Radio. He was also a manager and producer at CBS News and news director of ABC News' 24-hour cable television news service. He has written extensively about technology, media and international issues for a wide range of publications including the New York Times, Wired and USC's Online Journalism Review. He received the Overseas Press Club Award for international reporting for a series of broadcasts he produced on Iran.

Research interests: Immersive media
Public Diplomacy
International Broadcasting
Local News on television, radio and the Internet

http://ascweb.usc.edu/asc.php?pageID=26&thisFacultyID=266

Posted by Scott Fisher at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Wired 14.04: You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired!

Gaming tends to be regarded as a harmless diversion at best, a vile corruptor of youth at worst. But the usual critiques fail to recognize its potential for experiential learning. Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate.

via joi.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A position paper co-authored by Justin Hall and me was accepted to a workshop on "Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques for Collaboration Across Multiple Displays" at CHI 2006, the international conference for human-computer interaction to be held in Montreal, Canada in April. The paper describes IMD research over the past year on "Experiments in Backchannel: Collaborative Presentations Using Social Software, Google Jockeys, and Immersive Environments" . Looks like there'll be a wide variety of very interesting topics covered in the workshop and the papers are all posted here.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Have posted a few new internships on the IMD wiki.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 7:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Image by Brad Newman)

Title: "Surprise Menu: Eleven Courses in Seven Days" - Second Year Combined One-Week Interactive Design Project
Speakers: Students from CTIN 542, 544, 548
Time: Wednesday, March 8, 2006, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Each student has been provided a serving platter and cover dome with which they have conceived of, designed and produced an interactive experience in which something happens upon removal of the cover. This eleven course meal for the mind and senses shall begin promptly at 6:15 in ZML.

Surprise Menu: Eleven Courses in Seven Days
CTIN 542, 544, 548
Second Year Combined One-Week Interactive Design Project
Instructors/Jurors: Mark Bolas, Perry Hoberman, Michael Naimark, Peggy Weil

Due:
March 8th, 6 to 8 pm at 511 Seminar, ZML

Description:
Each of you is being provided with a serving platter and cover dome. You are to conceive of, design and produce an interactive experience in which something happens upon removal of the cover. This "something" should be at least one of the following: surprising, amazing, meaningful, bewildering, shocking, and/or thought-provoking.

Rules:
The primary input and output elements of each project should fit within the supplied serving plate and cover. However, you are allowed (but not necessarily encouraged) to run wires or use wireless connections to an external computer. This computer should be used only for processing, not for display or input. The choice of media and subject matter is totally up to you. Each student is responsible for their own project, and students may assist each other as they see fit. Outside help is allowed, but all such services must be donated.

Schedule:
The projects will be presented at the 511 seminar on Wednesday, March 8th. The eleven projects should be set up on the central table in ZML before the seminar begins. Presentations will be begin promptly at 6:15. Once the presentations begin, students will not be allowed to touch or adjust their projects (except in case of emergency). One by one, one of the four jurors will remove the cover of each project and engage with it for as long as they see fit, up to a maximum of four minutes each.

Equipment and Materials:
Students are welcome to use any of the electronic components and supplies available from the IML Electronics Lab. You can use any systems or devices that you already own, and any other materials and parts that you can purchase or scavenge. The student budget for the project should be between $0 and $100. Any and all components, systems, devices, sensors, materials are allowed. If you can get your hands on it, and you can make it fit under the cover, you're allowed to use it.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

REMINDER: Janey Murray from Georgia Tech will be speaking at the ZML tonight on the topic:
"Making Steven Cry: on knowing what to ask of game experience and game design"

Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

At the opening of the USC program, Steven Spielberg echoed the EA pioneers in setting the goal of making games that could make us cry. Is this an appropriate expectation of games? If so, how would you design to best produce a tearful experience? This talk examines this question, and related issues of immersion and of the cognitive origins of gameplay and story-making.

Backchannel Log from presentation: Download file

Posted by Scott Fisher at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March issue of Wired has an article about another location based entertanment venue in Madrid called " La Fuga" similar to the "TOMB: interactive, walk-through adventure experience" I posted in December.

"You're trapped in a high tech Spanish slammer, crawling through real tunnels, behind real bars. First-person gameplay breaks out of the box...Think of La Fuga (The Escape) as a $20 million cross between Halo and laser tag. The goal is simple: Decipher visual riddles to navigate and escape Mazzina, a high tech prison".

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)