The air pollution level is increasing globally at an alarming rate. In the last two decades, many cities have adopted policies to control the emission of pollutants to the atmosphere as well as to promote sustainable urban developments. However, many of these initiatives have concluded that a long term success would require investing in the environmental literacy of the general population.
In December of 2018, the University of Southern California’s MEML (Mobile and Environmental Media Lab) collaborated with its industry partners to launch EMOVAC, the Emotion Modeling Operational Variable Automatic Computer.
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 she is crossed.
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. When a StoryObject detects a nearby mobile phone running the interfacing application, these stories are revealed and delivered via images, video, and text.
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 project defines a course research aimed at developing a location-aware mobile-weblogging system. Through use of the Patholog system, users are able to engage in a form of personal storytelling through space based on the paths they have traveled, as well as contribute to a larger community narrative virtually layered upon a physical space.
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. Glacial ice presents a four-dimensional hyper-view into time and space, an icy tesseract giving us an 800,000 years view backwards into Earth’s climatological past and forwards towards the pending outcomes of current rising temperatures.
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. The goal is to engage the citizens in the process of reading and documenting air pollution data which would not only increase sensitivity towards the built environment but could trigger formulation of locally informed urban policies.