Sheridan Interactive Multimedia has a multimedia pioneering course that we have been running for almost 10 years.  It certainly has been exciting keeping up with the near future for so many years.  Some highlights for guest speakers have been: Bill Buxton, David Rokeby, Steve Mann, Vincent Jon Vincent, and dozens more.

We make sure the students build prototypes in technologies like multiuser, gesture tech, mediated reality (augmented and diminished).  We have prototyped tilt and multitouch for years – now these have moved into regular curriculum.

For the last few years we have also run club projects where groups run a club for various technologies.  For instance, last year we had Holograms, Reality Gaming, Ardino, Shape Recognition and Voice Recognition clubs.  The year before that was Wands, Second Life, Augmented Reality, iPhone, and 3D Vision.

This year the clubs were as follows with links to Blogs the students made for each topic:

• Mobile Remote Control (click for more)

• Brain Control (click for more)

• Virtual Reality (click for more)

• Mobile Accessories (click for more)

• Artificial Intelligence (click for more)

Above, Professor Dan Zen tries out a Brain Controlled Game

IMM Students control a paper shredder from their mobile device

Jam 3 won two Canadian Digi Awards (formerly Canadian New Media Awards) this year – 2011.  The incredible fact is that one was for the Best Design Team and the second was for the Best Development Team.  Way to go!

Jam 3 was founded in 2003 by three Sheridan Interactive Multimedia graduates Adrian Belina, Pablo Vio and Mark McQuillan.  They have since grown into a most excellent interactive team which also includes a number of IMM grads.  You can see the folks at Jam 3 in their creative assessment of what their team does http://jam3.com.  Here is a quote from Adrian Belina, one of the founders:

It a special evening when you are honoured for being tops in both Design and Development. These awards are especially nice because they’re not just about one project that a few people worked on… they speak to the hard working, passionate teams that make it all happen, all year round. Very proud of everyone at Jam3 right now.

These awards are also a great success for the IMM program as not only the partners, Mark, Pablo and myself, graduated from the IMM class but we also employ 3 developers from the program as well. A true testament to the quality of the program!

Stitch Media founded by IMM graduate, Evan Jones, also won a Digi Award for Best in Digital Advertising for the site Drunk and on Drugs.  Congrats Evan!

Sheridan Interactive Multimedia is now accepting applicants for 2012.  Great jobs!  Great careers!  Advance our culture making interactive fun and useful stuff!  Designers, come on in and learn how to make your work… work!  Programmers come on in and learn how to program in an interactive environment beyond navigation. Other disciplines like Marketing, Engineering, Illustration, Animation, Computer Science, welcome!  Get with the mobile revolution!

http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca (redesign on its way).

-2011-

David Neumann, the Web Design / Web App Development teacher at IMM is giving the first talk at the Spotlight HTML5 event in Toronto on Saturday Dec 3, 2011.

In this session we will walk through the main features of the HTML5 Geolocation API. From privacy concerns to fall back plans if location can’t be determined, we will look at an overview of what is for now an optional “nice to have” on many mobile web applications, but will be in the future a standard feature with interesting potential.

Hope you can make it there - SPOTLIGHT HTML5

The Osaka University of Electro Communications students of Gaming and Media came to visit Sheridan and are pictured below hanging out with the Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Post Grad class of 2012.  We went on to show our Gesture technology – waiving our hands at the camera to control motion in the computer.  We showed how it was done and made working applications.

For the presentation, we used a Flash AIR app called OrbitZoom (By Professor Dan Zen) to show the picture.  Being an AIR app, it works on the desktop as an image viewer or can easily be converted to mobile as AIR is on or can be published to iOS, Blackberry Playbook and future Blackberries, and Android devices.  There is a Web version CLICK HERE  Click the picture zoom and click the picture to stop zooming.  Press A for actual size – pan around by dragging.  Double click to return to full picture.

The Sheridan Interactive Multimedia one year post grad program is accepting applications for this September.  Please see our site at http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca.

-11-

Sheridan Interactive Multimedia - SUPERSTITION Theme

Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Open House was a success with many happy people making great comments about the work – congratulations graduates!  A number of industry were there looking to hire and it was also nice to see future students getting an idea of what is in store.

The complete set can be found on facebook and on Flickr.  If you were there, please come in and tag yourself on facebook!  There was a sheet with all the URLs of the grads – let me know and I can find it for you.

Sheridan Interactive Multimedia - Gesture Tek Samples

Sheridan Interactive Multimedia - Class of 2011 in Part

The Sheridan IMM Fist-bump booth at FITC 2011 - Scan Screen

FITC, one of the largest and longest running design and technology conferences in the world, had its 10th anniversary and the Sheridan Interactive Multimedia students provided an installation piece using Flash and FLAR (Augmented Reality) connected up to Facebook for a social media connection.

The installation let visitors digitally fist-bump each other (10 year anniversary) with the winner being the person with the most fist bumps.  The process was to first find out who they were by scanning a FLAR marker on their conference badge then to capture their face for a customizable avatar.  At this point they could also connect their marker to their Facebook account.  On a big screen, they scanned again to fist-bump a challenger who had followed the same process.  Big fists did the bumping, the totals were tallied and the winner was presented along with the custom avatars.  It was always a laugh seeing people’s avatars.  Your bump partner’s contact info was then sent off to Facebook.

Visitors at the Fist-bump installation + custom avatars

Animated fists doing the bumping - 10 fingers!

Overall there were about 400 unique fist-bumpers and lots of smiles and contacts made.  Congrats to the group for their hard work: Abeiene Nejar, Antonio Carito, Cherry Argana, Darren Neville, Jacky Kam, Joanna Ong, Justin Howlett, Tyler Lindo and Tyson Leslie.  The students explored a wide range of advanced interactive technologies such as augmented reality, face recognition, social media API’s, as well as traditional work with coding, motion graphics and database work.

Some of the members of the Sheridan IMM Fist-bump Team

If you would like to talk to the students or find out more about the project and program, please note we are having an open house on Friday, May 13 – click SUPERSTITION to find out more.  Thanks to Shawn Pucknel at FITC for providing the students with such a great opportunity.

-2011-

S U P E R S T I T I O N

Friday the 13 at Function 13 at 13:00 hours!
http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca/openhouse/2011/

Our IMM Post-grads will show their work with respect to:

* Flash Mobile for Android and iPhone
* JQuery for Mobile Web Apps
* Gesture Technology for Gesture Tek Cube
* FLAR Augmented Reality & Arduino
* Games, Apps, Sites, Social Media API’s and More!

Be there or be HEXED! #cc0000 #eeeeee #13aa00

Dan Zen

Professor, Coordinator of Curriculum and Industry Liaison
Sheridan Interactive Multimedia
Canadian New Media Educator of the Year 2008
http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca/

Mad inventor meets Internet finds peace
Canadian New Media Awards Programmer of the Year 2002
http://www.danzen.com/

~2011~

We had a few running second term last year but now all the students have them on iOS, Android with Windows Mobile 7 and Blackberry just around the corner.  In class we have a dozen iPhone, iPod Touc, iPads, Android ViewSonic and Samsung Galaxy devices.  The students have apps up and running on the devices primarily through using the Adobe Flash / AIR packagers for iOS and Android which lets them build once and publish across many devices.  We have a quick look at the native iOS apps as well and some of the students have done personal project work in this area.

Tyson Leslie's Punch Driven Android App

The tools and techniques to prepare apps for mobile devices are still in their early stages often requiring a dozen steps with installs and command lines, etc.  to run emulators, handle signing, etc.  We have been working through these steps in our second term Multimedia Pioneering course and some of the notes and discussion can be found on our Flash to Mobile Facebook group which is open to everybody to join.  The skills to build the applications in general are embedded in our other courses from Web Authoring, Motion Graphics, Web Design and Application Development where Web based apps are also looked at.

William Chong's DumbBots

The response from the students when seeing their apps on actual devices was so exciting.  Here are a few blog posts of the experience – certainly not all roses but that’s what happens when you pioneer technology.

Will – http://interactivewill.wordpress.com/
Greetings Pioneers! Let’s continue the MOBILE-STREAK!

Joanna – http://ongjf.wordpress.com/
At last, I finally got some of my flash applications into the iphone! I’ve been waiting for this moment since the start of the term!!

Antonio – http://otiracimm.wordpress.com/
I can now put my apps on Android devices!

There were many more and we look forward to presenting the apps at our Open House in April or May – stay tuned!

-2011-