# Grant Applicant Information. 2. CAMIT Project Title. Sra, Misha Council for the Arts at MIT. CAMIT Grants February 2016

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1 Council for the Arts at MIT CAMIT Grants February 2016 Sra, Misha 235 Albany St. Cambridge, MA 02139, US Submitted: Feb :50PM 1. Grant Applicant Information 1. Affiliation Graduate Student #11 2. MIT Department/Group Media Lab 3. Your preferred phone number MIT Address E Past funding I have not received funding from CAMIT before 6. Please upload your resume/cv here (pdf preferred) File Uploaded KB 2. CAMIT Project Title 1 1. Project Title

2 Looking forward to the past 2. Project Location MIT Campus 3. Faculty Advisor 4. Project Start Date 02/20/ Project End Date 05/20/ CAMIT Project Description 1. Project Description Virtual reality (VR) is about sitting in your living room, putting on goggles and being transported anywhere. What makes it different than watching movies or playing video games on a screen is the relationship between you and the portrayed environment. You become part of the environment, a participant in the generated experience, not a passive viewer looking at the environment or interacting with it from the outside. We are building an installation in virtual reality which multiple participants will be able to experience concurrently, not from their living rooms, but outdoors in the real world marks the 100th year of MIT s move from Boston to Cambridge and we are interested in creating a virtual time travel experience which will begin by immersing participants in the campus environment of 1916 and continue into a possible future of familiar outdoor spaces and buildings. We have started exploring the MIT library archives for maps and photos of campus from 1916 as well as gathering data from the MIT museum. Our goal is to virtually recreate a portion of the campus as faithfully as we can to give people a visceral sense of what being at MIT may have been back then. Additionally, we will create a futuristic virtual scenario which could come straight out of the Jetsons, a post-apocalyptic world, or an imaginary future of our campus using real world projected climate change data. For our site, we have chosen to use the circular low walled space between buildings E15/E14 and E23. This site was chosen because of proximity to our workspace making it faster to deploy, test and iterate on the design as well as high people traffic when the weather is nice. At the installation site, four virtual reality headsets (head-mounted displays or HMDs like the Oculus Rift or the Samsung GearVR) will be made available for users to wear and get transported to the MIT of 1916 and travel from that time to a few hundred years into the future. Each participant will be able to see appropriately designed avatars, representing each person wearing an HMD, walking, looking, talking, and being in the virtual place as they are in real life. When VR is done well, the interface disappears and the brain responds to events in that space as real. This notion of being in the virtual environment is embodied in a concept called presence and is the cornerstone of good VR design. This project contributes to an understanding of our environment through an immersion in the constant recreation of its utility and aesthetics, learning a new respect for the solidity of the earth and the transitory nature of human endeavor. To experience time thrumming against the spaces we think we know so intimately is to see ourselves in ways we have forgotten or left undiscovered. 2. How will this project involve the MIT community? We want the experience to be rooted in a real world place on the MIT campus, where the community can discover and feel the joy of experiencing something out of the ordinary as everyone goes about their daily lives. It is especially meaningful given this year marks MIT s Century in Cambridge. It is a time to commemorate and 2

3 celebrate the past while planning and imagining the future. As someone who will be graduating next year, I find myself stopping to reflect upon my time at MIT as I walk through familiar places on campus. It brings forth a gnawing feeling of apprehension about going out into the world tinged with a touch of excitement about starting on a new adventure and I am certain others on campus share the same feelings. This project is my way of bringing the community together in the present by sharing a past. 4. CAMIT Budget Summary 1. Total project cost Amount being requested from the Council for the Arts Financial contributions from other sources In-kind contributions from other sources Samsung 5. Please upload your completed budget spreadsheet - please save as pdf - from here: [ If you have any questions, please contact Susan Cohen at cohen@media.mit.edu File Uploaded 40.8 KB 3

4 Council for the Arts at MIT - Grant Application Budget Project title: Applicant's name: Looking forward to the past Misha Sra Please fill in the shaded cells where appropriate. Date: February 12, 2016 Project Expenses Expense Type (materials/equipment/fees/etc.) Requested Cash Contributions (other sources) In-kind Contributions (other sources) Amount from CAMIT Source Amount Source Amount 1 Outdoor position tracking system $ 9, $ 5, Media Lab $ 4, Virtual Reality Head-mounted displays (HMDs) 0 Samsung Research America 3 Leap Motion sensors $ Media Lab $ Misc (3D printing, props, mounts etc) $ 1, Media Lab $ 1, Totals $ 10, $ 5, $ 5, Total Project Costs Total requested from other sources Total requested from CAMIT $ $ $ 10, , ,000.00

5 Reference Chris Schmandt Director, Living Mobile Group MIT Media Lab x Relationship: Advisor Waiver: The applicant waived the right to review this reference. Feb :34PM The Media Laboratory Massachusetts InstituteChris Schmandt of TechnologyDirector, Living Mobile Group 20 Ames Street, E Cambridge, Massachusetts February 18, 2016 Recommendation letter for Misha Sra Misha Sra has been my advisee for 4 ½ years, first as an MS student and currently for the PhD, in Media Arts and Sciences. During this time she has built a number of interactive group experiences based on wireless technology, such as a team game in both virtual and physical space played outdoors in Kresge Oval. She is strongly interested in using technology to get people out and moving about, with an emphasis on interactive and social situations afforded by technology. I have been working with Misha for some months to develop some appropriate applications for outdoor spaces, 4

6 where now the outdoor built environment becomes part of the virtual or augmented space as well. One possible idea, still under consideration, is a virtual Freedom Trail with character piece players, overlaid upon the real Freedom Trail. This may be overly ambitious, which is why she is currently focusing on the Great Court are and the upcoming celebration of the crossing of the Charles by MIT. By definition such experiences are an installation. Although perhaps entirely mobile and virtual, thereby leaving no physical footprint, they could only be experienced by being present in the actual physical location where the virtual experience happens. This is exciting because it is a relatively new genre, and has both artistic and educational applications. If anyone can do this project, it is Misha. She is hard working, focused, and takes full responsibility for making her own systems work. She has high standards for the performance of her interactive systems, and is very demanding of herself. I offer ideas, critique, and support, but I do not manage her time, that is not at all necessary. She overcame great technical obstacles to make previous outdoor systems work it is never as easy as it should be with loss of data radio signal, interference, or lack of enough open sky to get reliable GPS coordinates. So her proposed project is quite experimental, but it should be a great participatory experience when she makes it work. Of course I fully support her time as a research assistant, Council funding would allow her (and commit her!) to build this specific installation. Hopefully, it will be fun! Sincerely, Chris Schmandt Principal Research Scientist 5

7 Feb :51PM Joichi Ito Director MIT Media Lab (617) Relationship: Director of Lab, SM Thesis reader Waiver: The applicant waived the right to review this reference. I am writing in enthusiastic support of Misha Sra for the CAMIT grant. I got to know Misha over the course of two semesters in 2013 where I was on her Master's Thesis committee. Her project was of interest to me because it aimed to foster connections between people, use the outdoors differently, involved using physical actions for digital interactivity, and playful. From my observation and interaction with her, I attribute her success to three valuable character traits:(i) creative intelligence; (ii) technical skills; and (iii) diligence. She iteratively designed the game experience for her Master's Thesis from a paper version to the digital version, created a functional prototype, and ran several rounds of user testing. She is particularly good in exploring the possibilities of new technologies, developing solutions as a designer to respond to them, and in bringing new design concepts into the outdoor space where groups of people can experience and interact with her research. More recently, she has been working on a virtual reality system where the physical world is used as a template for the placement of obstacles in the virtual world such that a correspondence in scale, spatial layout, and object placement is created. Although virtual worlds offer high levels of realism, two elements from everyday life seldom included in their natural form are touch and walking. She gave a talk about her work at a conference last summer and showed how the association between the real and the virtual worlds can allow multiple people to inhabit a shared virtual space, interact with each other, and interact with objects just like they would in real life. Now she would like to bring this idea outdoors and create an immersive time travel experience marking the 100th year of MIT's moving to Cambridge and I support and encourage her undertaking a challenging and unconventional project in virtual reality. To summarize, I believe Misha's technical strengths, overall strong problem solving ability, and a desire to create meaningful experiences will allow her to create and deliver a great experience. I wish her success and hope you will consider her for the CAMIT grant. Please do not hesitate to contact me in case you require any additional feedback. 6