November 25, 2008, 12:01 pm
MIT Media Lab Announces Center for Future Storytelling
by Lisa Agustin
Filed under: Current Events, Technology
The traditional approach to storytelling is at risk, thanks to an attention-deficient lifestyle, and the technologies that feed into it, like text messaging and YouTube. Now the MIT Media Lab has teamed up with Plymouth Rock Studios, a Massachusetts-based movie studio, to create the Center for Future Storytelling as a way to keep the storytelling process alive by revolutionizing it. According to the MIT press release:
By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web. Center research will also focus on ways to revolutionize imaging and display technologies, including developing next-generation cameras and programmable studios, making movie production more versatile and economic.
The Center is expected to leverage technologies pioneered at the Media Lab, like digital systems that understand people at an emotional level, or cameras capable of capturing the intent of the storyteller. While the movie-making world is expected to benefit directly from the Center’s research, it will be interesting to see how results might innovate the business world and the approaches companies use to tell their own unique stories.
Comments
Drop what you are doing and tell the person next to you something about your life. Repeat the next day. Who needs technology when simple practice is all that is needed?
Posted by Andrew Gilmartin on November 29, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Sometimes the MIT Media Lab sounds like an invention of the Onion. How to overcome the attention-deficit lifestyle? Why, with video and joysticks! Why not a strobe light and very loud random explosions as well?
Posted by Henry Woodbury on December 3, 2008 at 9:52 am