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. In this paper we describe particular experiments we performed in our “Zemeckis Media Lab”: fourteen screens and projectors in a horse-shoe shape where students and faculty can share multiple data feeds. Laptops and desktop computers in the room can send visual information to the group.

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.