New Media Capstone Night, Thursday, May 2, 6-8pm
Get out of that chair and immerse yourself! For the first time, this year’s annual exhibition of standout New Media projects takes place in our spanking-new IMRC building. Discover how our seniors are already taking advantage of this cutting-edge facility, and learn how mobile apps, immersive projections, and social networks are drawing participants into new connections with nature and real-world communities.
New Media Night
Thursday 2 May 2013
Innovative Media Research and Commercialization center
Officially opening this month, the IMRC center at Stewart Hall offers extraordinary opportunities for undergraduates, grad students, and faculty to immerse themselves in the latest tools for media production.
Makers will be excited to get their hands on the 3d fabrication and circuit prototyping labs, complete with laser engraver, large format printers, and a CNC mill and router.
Students who want to surround their viewers with a media-rich environment can exploit a 360-degree audiovisual projection room and a 25-foot high DMX-enabled performance space.
Several of the capstones on view already harness these facilities. Inside the cavernous IMRC performance space is the Minecave, a gestural interface to the popular Minecraft building game, set inside an enormous block scaled so that a pixel is a foot tall. Instead of clicking with a keyboard or mouse, users wave their hands and move their head to navigate this virtual world.
Other immersive capstones on view feature video projections that make the walls of a theater come alive, or offer a new relationship with your shadow, or force you to look at your environment from a 3rd person perspective.
Want to climb boulders? Learn to hunt and forage? Garden with neighbors? How about just staying fit?
There’s a wide world out there to immerse yourself in, and this year’s students have produced a number of mobile and Web apps to help you enjoy the outdoors.
New social networks on view draw in writers, alumni, meme afficionados, folklore enthusiasts, even those who share a refrigerator.
View From Above integrates photos from all over the world to create mosaic portraits, while Drummatik lets audiophiles upload their own samples to create an ever-growing palette of beats and riffs.
Visitors who want to immerse themselves in information, meanwhile, will find history lessons in remixed public service announcements and documentaries on interactive iBooks.
Several of the projects on display have already been acclaimed as this year’s undergraduate research award winners, including works by Coralie Dupice, Andrew Robbins, Duane Shimmel, and Anna Werner. Derek O’Brien, whose iPad book documents how hardware can help the disabled, was profiled last week in the Bangor Daily News.
IMRC sits at the north end of campus across from the tennis courts, in the space previously occupied by Stewart Commons.