Augmented reality (AR) offers live performance the opportunity to integrate communal experience and individualized interaction through layers of digital media. At UCLA REMAP, Burke has been exploring the use of AR in immersive theater in order to understand design, technology, and storytelling methods and strategies. This lecture explored what we have learned through past and upcoming projects in which AR operates diegetically and is central to its characters' dramatic action; touching on both artistic and technology strategies, open research challenges, and opportunities for applying recent advances in artificial intelligence

Jeff Burke is a Professor of Theater and Associate Dean, Research and Technology at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT). Professor Burke co-directs the UCLA REMAP, a joint effort of TFT and the Samueli School of Engineering. At UCLA, he recently completed an AR immersive theater production set in the world of Amazon Studios’ The Man in the High Castle, and is working on an AR theater adaptation of the Hugo Award-winning novel The City and The City. He is also currently leading the Innovation, Culture, and Creativity project, an NSF-supported effort to develop new opportunities at the intersection of the creative and technology sectors

Core mechanics, or verbs, like 'jumping' offer game designers allow game designers to operationalize the player's vague identification with an avatar. They sit between the machine's calculations and the player's gesturing fingers, and translate both into the metaphoric terms that bring game worlds to life. Players come to that understanding through countless small repetitions of an action, which vary in countless ways. In this lecture, Peter McDonald isolated and anatomized a few specific jumps from a YouTube long-play of Hollow Knight (2017) to show the layers of subtle meaning that a player needs to master to speak the language of a game. These iterations of the same movement echo at different scales of repetition throughout the game, in particular for the level design of Hollow Knight.

Dr. Peter McDonald is an Assistant Professor of Design, Informal, and Creative Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on the intersection of interpretation and games, and tracks the rise of play as an aesthetic category in the late 20th century. His book from MIT Press, "Run and Jump," uses a structuralist lens to examine the formal elements of 2D platforming games.

The history of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in movies is often presented as a hero’s journey. Starting in the 1980s, a scrappy group of computer scientists went up against the large, powerful, but inert, Hollywood studio empire, and forever changed how movies are made. In this lecture, Kim presented that history, and a counter-history. Starting in the 1980s, a scrappy group of computer scientists ensured that historical biases towards young, white skin and straight, blond hair embedded in film and photography technology would be carried over from the analog era into the digital. Kim concluded the lecture with current efforts to confront these biases after the murder of George Floyd. This is a multi-institution effort spanning the sciences and humanities, and includes our group at Yale.

A two-time Academy Award Winner, Theodore Theodore Kim is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Yale University, where he investigates topics in solid and fluid mechanics. Previously, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Pixar Animation Studios. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, multiple Best Paper awards, and two Scientific and Technical Academy Awards (SciTech Oscars). His algorithms have appeared in over 20 films, and he has screen credits for Cars 3, Coco, Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4.

Sponsorship Partners: Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University Office of Vice Provost, Drexel University Office for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design's Dean's Office of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, & Anti-Racism (IDEA)