Immersed in the mixed reality world of YOKAI, you check into your Tokyo Airbnb to find a Zashiki Warashi, an otherworldly roommate that you must engage and befriend to bridge her world and yours. This particular Yokai is a mischievous house spirit that will attract good fortune and wealth to a household if she is happy – or devastation and ruin if sh
EMERGE·LA is a research project at USC that looks at the changing nature of Los Angeles and its many neighborhoods, designed to give you a voice and us a sense of what is important to you about the city we live in.
The objects of our everyday lives contain stories about the materials they are made from, who designed them, and what they might have been before they assumed their current form. StoryObjects gives a voice to the everyday objects in the USC School of Cinematic Arts building, allowing them to share their embedded stories and histories.
MobZombies is a zombie-fleeing game where a player’s movement controls an avatar in the game space. Players run away from virtual zombies by actually running. The objective of the game is simple: stay alive as a horde of the undead slowly moves towards you. The longer you stay alive, the more zombies appear and the better they get at following you.
This research project explored how immersive design tools may impact the future of design and creative work. Insights from fieldwork with designers and engineers at Steelcase inspired a series of design fiction scenarios in room-scale VR.
The Ice-Time project is a creative response to the perilous state of Earth's ecosystem. Ice, like geology, is a primary indicator of the deep time of our planet’s environment. Ice is also the most visible indicator of the short-term effects of climate change.
LA CitySense proposes to couple air quality sensing kits to bikes, enabling the citizens, to map as they ride recording the pollutant concentration in different areas of the city.
SCI Universe is a large-format touch-based interface designed for the lobby of the new Interactive Media Building at USC School of Cinematic Arts. This interface provides an overview of current activity in the building through both environmental and inhabitant data.
In the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, we experimented to find ways networked communication could augment and amplify the content of classroom education, promoting collaborative processing and retention.
This research project explores potential applications of location-based information services over wireless networks. The near-term objective has been to design and prototype an “environmental media” system for linking virtual environments to the physical world, and that enables a mobile user to browse a spatially correspondent multimedia information database about a specific location as it changes over time.
About MEML
Housed within USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, The Mobile & Environmental Media Lab’s design methodology straddles the cultures of visual storytelling, games, and interaction design. Accordingly, our work mashes together conceptual tools of storytelling (dramatic arc, character motivation, conflict, obstacles, and resolution) with the core concerns of game design (systems, procedures, constraints, objectives, resources, core mechanics). Our research has explored context- and location-specific mobile storytelling, interactive architecture, vehicular and environmental lifelogging, and automotive experience design.
Overall, this research investigates the idea of ambient storytelling and how the built environment can act as a storytelling entity that engages and interacts with the people in specific spaces. Development of personalized responsive environments is enabled as people engage with these locations and build a relationship with the spaces they spend time in every day. By integrating context-aware interactions and access to backstory about an environment, ambient stories emerge and can be accessed through mobile and pervasive computing technologies and applications.
Our current research concepts came out of early research about new models for mobile advertising in which the goal was to create compelling experiences in contrast to the current state of mobile advertising, which relies on banner ads or text messages. The idea of backstory, location and context-specific information about products and objects became a recurrent theme when thinking about new forms of advertising. This became the groundwork for our current research into ambient and mobile storytelling. In addition, the practice of lifelogging, or documenting and broadcasting oneʼs daily activities with wearable computing devices, has been another important focus of our research. However, instead of people documenting their activities, we focus on designing lifelogs for the built environment. These lifelogs for physical spaces combine various building, environmental and human sensor data, as well as collaboratively-authored character development. These elements, when combined, create the groundwork for ambient, mobile storytelling.