Project Studios

The Digital Media program offers studio courses in which students work in small groups on faculty-led long-term research projects in the New Media Center. Project Studio, LCC 6650, is a required course, carrying 3 credits and involving 9 hours of lab work and 1 hour of group seminar meeting per week. It can be taken once or multiple times. Admission to any particular section of Project Studio is by permission of instructor.

Assistant Professor Alexandra (Ali) Mazalek

Synaesthetic Media Lab

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Synlab explores emerging modalities in new media. Our research focuses on tangible interaction and sensing technologies that support creative expression bridging the physical and digital
worlds. Applications range across media arts, entertainment and educational domains. Weekly lab meetings are held in the Synlab space in TSRB 209.

Assistant Professor Fox Harrell

Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab/Studio

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This research lab and project studio explores the intersection of imaginative cognition and computational expression through a combination of theory and practice. Our view of imaginative cognition is grounded in cognitive science approaches emphasizing the embodied, distributed, and situated nature of cognition, focusing on topics such as metaphor, analogy, conceptual blending, and narrative imagining. Our view of computational expression focuses on technical representational strategies for interactive and generative artistic forms, with an eye toward richly evocative content, narrative, and social empowerment. Currently, we focus on theories of cognitive categorization, social classification, identity politics to inform projects in digital media forms such as gaming, interactive and generative narrative, and architectures for identity representation.

Assistant Professor Michael Nitsche

Players

We will investigate the role of the player in digital worlds by combining practical experiments, theory, and analysis. The course will concentrate on three main areas:

Body and memory (project: Unlocking Body Memories)
Play and creation (project: Machinima)
Performance and expression (project: Second Life Augmented Reality)

The goal is to discover the connections between different positions and gradually develop a better understanding of the role of the player overall. The project studio will be divided into three sections. Each one will broadly cover one interest area.

The first third will investigate comprehension, mental engagement, and cognitive aspects of play. How do players comprehend game worlds - and can we use their mental engagement and activation to new means? We will look specifically into the role of body memory and 3D animation.

The second part continues the idea of the engaged player but concentrates on creative input. What kinds of interfaces allow the player to express him/herself better in the game world? One focus will be the visualization and camera control in 3D spaces.

The last section builds on this kind of expressive range in games and applies concepts from Performance Theory to look at the role of the player as performer. It will concentrate especially on mixed media performances.

Students are strongly encouraged to join practical projects that each live in one of these sections. That means each student will participate in the overall Project Studio meeting with its reading assignment and discussion as well as the individual weekly project session.

Professor Janet Murray

Narrative/e-TV News Project Studio

My project studio for next fall (and spring) will focus on two interrelated research agendas:

A. (primarily for MS students) Experimental TV and News structures
Prototyping of new forms of explanatory interfaces for broadband and convergence media platforms, focusing on reporting news, tracking news stories over time, and -- most importantly -- making sense of complex issues. Possibly in conjunction with a PBS news show and/or a major repository of tv news.

Continuing projects: interactive story interfaces, EPGs and wiiPG's (programming guides for the expanded content of new platforms, including navigation by wii)
Some of these projects would be appropriate for HCI MS usability studies.
Students doing MS projects on related topics or wishing to continue related work begun in other courses are encouraged to apply.

B. (primarily for PhD students) Advanced Narrative Schema
For PhD Students working on Quals, Dissertations, or research projects in the area of interactive narrative. The weekly meetings will provide a framework for discussing work in progress and for collective consideration of key theories and artifacts. Focus is the representation of narrative elements in computational form, and the coherent presentation and navigation of multisequential and multiform stories.
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Students requesting admission to the project studio should specify group A or B and if you have not worked with me before please include a pointer to your CV/portfolio and brief description of your skills and interests.

Assistant Professor Carl DiSalvo

Neighborhood Networks

The Neighborhood Networks project researches how neighborhood groups use or might use robotic and sensing technologies as a means to publicly express and address their concerns. In Fall 2008 project studio, we will begin the research and development process for a community design project in Atlanta that will take place in the Spring/Summer of 2009. Fall 2008 activities will include: background research on local advocacy groups and issues, research on similar community design projects in other locales and research on methods for community engagement. In addition, we will develop a participatory design project involving sensing and robotics to introduce potential community partners to the possibilities inherent in these technologies. Finally, we will design and develop a web-based infrastructure to support the project.

Assistant Professor Brian Magerko

Adaptive Digital Media Lab

The Adaptive Digital Media Lab explores how to create digital media experiences
that tailor themselves to individual users. These adaptations may occur
for dramatic purposes (e.g. interactive narrative), educational purposes
(e.g. AI & serious games), and / or purely for entertainment (e.g.
improvisational characters). This research involves work in design,
artificial intelligence, human computer interaction, and cognitive
psychology. We have several ongoing projects and are starting new ones
in the following areas:
- interactive narrative for MMOs and education
- tool and environment design for interactive narrative systems
- discourse interaction with synthetic characters
- improvisational behavior of humans and synthetic characters

Please email Dr. Brian Magerko (magerko@gatech.edu) for any questions
concerning the project studio.

Assistant Professor Ian Bogost

Journalism and Videogames

This project studio conducts research on the intersection of games and journalism. Despite the changes introduced by the web, journalism remains mostly the same online. News sites still publish written stories similar to those inked onto newsprint. They upload video segments like those broadcast for television. They stream monologues and interviews like those sent over the radio airwaves. The tools that make the creation and dissemination of news possible have become simpler and more accessible, but the process remains similar: stories still have to be written and edited, films shot and cut, radio recorded and uplinked.
The purpose of this project studio is to survey, document, and analyze all the historical, contemporary, and potential ways that videogames (and game-like media) have or can contribute to journalistic practice. We will strive to understand both "journalism" and "games" in the widest way possible, including news, editorial, journalism education, even media disciplines like entertainment and fashion. Likewise, we will consider traditional videogames, emerging genres, trends, interface techniques, and interaction models.
Participants are welcomed who are interested in either games or journalism or both, or any related domain.

Professor Janet Murray

Enhanced Television (eTV)

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We will be creating interactive TV prototypes including a broadband channel and a project for the Cartoon Network, and an annotated and closely segmented edition of a film or TV series. See http://etv.gatech.edu and also the magazine article on the Casablanca Digital Critical edition [PDF] for more information.

Professor Janet Murray

Mobile Technologies Group (MTG)

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Ph.D. student David Jimison will lead a small group in creating a mobile pervasive game.

Professor Janet Murray

Advanced Stories Group (ASG)

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Ph.D. student Hartmut Koenitz will lead a small group in creating and experiencing interactive narratives.

Assistant Professor Celia Pearce

MMOG Design and Implementation: Mermaids

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Mermaids is one of the The Emergent Game Group (EGG) research projects under Experimental Game Lab(EGL).
This Project Studio is devoted to a multi-semester project to design and develop a massively multiplayer game that takes place in an underwater mermaid society. The over-arching research question will be the development of design features that integrate and enhance emergent social behavior, including the use of procedural techniques and player-created content.
For the 2008-2009 school year, we will continue our ongoing development of the Mermaids MMOG with the goal of releasing a playable alpha of the game at the end of the Fall term and presenting a demo at the Game Developers Conference in the Spring Term.

Assistant Professor Alexandra (Ali) Mazalek and Assistant Professor Michael Nitsche

Tangible Interfaces for Real-Time 3D Environments

Students design and build tangible interface props for real-time creation and control of various aspects of 3D virtual environments, such as character, camera, and space. Physical design and development is done at the Synaesthetic Media Lab, while 3D content creation is done in the Experimental Game Lab.

Professor Jay Bolter

Mobile Experience Design

This Project Studio will use mobile technologies (i.e., increasingly smart mobile phones) to design experiences for entertainment and informal education, including mobile and pervasive games. The Mobile Experience Lab is affiliated with Blair MacIntyre’s Augmented Experience Lab. We will also work closely with David Jimison’s MTG, sharing resources and ideas. I have worked in the past with Blair MacIntyre on a dramatic experience called Four Angry Men and an historical tour called The Voices of Oakland. These were implemented using experimental Augmented Reality (AR) Technology. We now want to reimagine and redesign such experiences for the widely available technology of mobile phones.

Professor Jay Bolter

Augmented Experience Design

This Project Studio involves the same project space as Mobile Experience Design. The difference lies in the technology used. In collaboration with Blair MacIntyre, we will be using Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) and advanced tracking systems to prototype location-based experiences. Students working in both Project Studios may have the opportunity to work with students and researchers in Sweden on a project to stage a narrative or gamelike experience collocated in a historic cemetery in Karlskrona, Sweden, and the Oakland Cemetery here in Atlanta.
DM, HCC, and HCI students are invited to join either of these two related Project Studios.