Issue date: 4/21/08 Section: Style

Media Credit: Bill Kuykendall Jason Walker and Ryan Schaller, "The Dig"

Media Credit: Bill Kuykendall Yeshe Parks is interacting with ROV Labs, a project by Alex Lessard and Greg Jones.

Media Credit: Bill Kuykendall Jason Walker and Ryan Schaller, "The Dig"

Perhaps you know a new media capstone student. The telltale signs are hours locked away in a room, eyes bleary with code, emerging once or twice to mumble something about robots, fish, economics or blogging.

For a major that refuses to define itself, New Media Students have a unique position among college students: their final year is spent struggling to define an entire field of study, as opposed to reflect on what they've learned.

For students enrolled in their senior year in the department, The New Media Capstone Night is an opportunity to provide that answer.

Seventeen projects were on display at the fair, ranging from interactive touch-screen movies, like Ryan Schaller's and Jason Walker's "The Dig," to kits allowing children to build underwater robots controllable over the Web, such as Alex Lessard's and Greg Jones' "ROV Labs." Another project, "Me-Campus," is an evolution of The Maine Campus newspaper that is driven by community contributions.



ROV LABS

ROVlabs is a project with a wide scope: an underwater robot that students can build and deploy at the NAME OF AQUARIUM, with kits costing less than $100 per team, it's an exercise in engineering. The projects deployment underwater, with streaming video, is a close-up look at the world underseas. Since robots are also controllable over the Web, it's an interactive tool for people who can't make it to the aquarium.



MECAMPUS

Pattie Barry and Adrianne Hess are, in the interest of full disclosure, not only co-workers, but also my roommates. In traditional journalism, this would make this paragraph suspect. But with the new, community-driven model the two have developed for their project, ME-CAMPUS, people writing about friends, activities, or clubs firsthand isn't a problem, it's a bonus: a way of getting communities beyond just reporting, but also talking. Part newspaper, part LiveJournal, the site is looking to create an online destination for everyone who does anything online at the University of Maine.

Partnered with The Maine Campus, it also provides an opportunity for individuals to access traditional news reporting, while encouraging comments and feedback on the stories you see.



THE DIG

New Media doesn't have to involve high-end supercomputers or dizzying amounts of theory. For Ryan Schaller and Jason Walker, their project involved a camera on night mode, some masking tape and MAX MSP software. The result is an interactive animation, "The Dig." The animation, created by Schaller, follows an explorer in an underground tomb. As he explores the cavern, touch-screen interactions allow a viewer to "dig" out the artifacts in each tomb - including some archaic media, such as floppy disks.



CLASSROOM WIDGETS

Kevin Mitchell's project was designed to assist students in grade schools with their homework assignments. A widget was created which could be implemented into the start dock for a mac. Teachers use the widget to post homework assignments and class notes, which can be accessed after school.

This project was already tested at Poland Regional High School and Minot Consolidated Schools for three weeks.

"Teachers said it really cut down on the amount of e-mail they would get," Mitchell said.



NEW MEDIA MACHINIMA

Paul Goodman's project is about using video game editing tools as a low-cost special effects studio for amateur film makers. "Machinima" refers to the Internet phenomenon of game players using scenes from games to tell stories beyond their original intent - Telling a love story using footage from Grand Theft Auto, for example.

"I wanted to take Machinima to a deeper level," Goodman explained.

Goodman's twist is to combine the tools used for modifying game engines with live-action scenes. Melding the two, the game editors end up building "sets" for amateur science fiction backgrounds on the cheap.



INTERPHASE PROJECT

Jasper Turcotte and Elizabeth Walker acknowledge their project was ambitious: "We may have bitten off more than we could swallow," Turcotte said in his presentation. The project was intended to be an immersive video game that used the structure of the Internet to create massive variety in the game's world. Every Web site became it's own planet, with the site's content deciding the planets environments.

The project has accomplished that task, minus the playability factor. In the meantime, it serves as a unique metaphor for understanding the structure of the Web and the relationships between sites.

"The internet has a structure that you don't usually see by looking page to page," Walker explained.

The two said they didn't intend to continue development on the project, but would be interested in handing it over to parties that might want to expand the game.

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