I recently spent some time at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina Del Rey. This is a group of very smart people working on some very cool invergence projects!
I met with Cheryl Birch, who gave me a tour of their facility (see below for photos) and then sat down for a great discussion with Bill Swartout, Dirctor of Technology and employee #1 at the ICT. Bill has a facinating background and we discovered that in different ways we both shared a transition from entertainment to computer science and then back to entertainment-related technology in our careers.
I’m happy to report that after this conversation Bill and I both decided that it would be great to have him as a presenter at Inverge 2008 to talk about the convergence of physical + virtual.
As a fan of Star Trek (a great example of a transmedia property) it was fun for me to visit the ICT because one vision that drives some of their research is how to eventually make something like Star Trek’s holodeck a reality. Also, their offices were designed by Herman Zimmerman, production designer for several incarnations of Star Trek on TV and film. With all the oak and metal, it was sort of like the Nike World Campus meets Star Trek: The Next Generation’s briefing room.
Bill oversees various projects at the ICT including virtual humans, virtual worlds, immersion, games and simulations. They have also collaborated with Hollywood visual effects supervisors on such groundbreaking movies at The Matrix and SpiderMan 2.
Here are some photos I took on my visit:
Virtual human research
Conference room designed by Star Trek production designer Herman Zimmerman
A place to relax after staring at pixels for too long. Notice any resemblance to Ten-Forward?
Bill Swartout, Director of Technology at the USC ICT and scheduled Inverge 2008 presenter