News

Physical distancing and the inability to perform in front of a live audience during the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t stopped the cast and director of SOMNIUM, which premieres online Friday. SOMNIUM features actors and a green screen, which provides a virtual reality space allowing the audience to participate.

Niantic has donated $400,000 to create a new research lab at RIT that’s focused on location-based games. In the Niantic x RIT Geo Games and Media Research Lab, researchers will work to better understand how people interact with location-based games and how they can be used for good.

Prospective students who may be thinking of attending RIT can now take a campus tour from their home with a new mobile app that features augmented reality with 360-degree videos.

It doesn’t take long for art to imitate life, as evidenced with virtual live productions of life amid COVID-19 scheduled this week on Twitch TV. The Canadian Wiggler, written, directed and produced by RIT's David Munnell, uses virtual reality and actors in a live webcast. It is set in May 2020, when the coronavirus lockdown is taking its toll.

Scientists from RIT and the University of Rochester aim to use virtual reality to help restore vision for people with stroke-induced blindness. The team of researchers led by RIT's Gabriel Diaz, are developing a method they believe could revolutionize rehabilitation for patients with cortically induced blindness, which afflicts about 1% of the population over age 50.

Michael Murdoch, an assistant professor of color science, received a prestigious National Science Foundation award to research how the human visual system perceives a mix of augmented reality and real-world content.

The Alfred Hitchcock classic Dial M for Murder has a new twist as NTID Performing Arts translates the play into American Sign Language, making it accessible to deaf audiences. Deaf and hard-of-hearing audience members can also experience cutting-edge closed-captioning technology using smartglasses developed by Vuzix Corp.

There’s always something new to experience at the Imagine RIT: Creativity and Innovation Festival, which this year featured more than 400 exhibits, including a human hamster wheel, performances by student ensembles, cutting-edge video games and demonstrations to determine how color can affect your mood.

Using augmented reality to make STEM content more accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing learners in live presentation settings is the goal of a $258,000 grant from the National Science Foundation awarded to NTID.

David Long, associate professor in RIT’s College of Art and Design, has been appointed director of RIT’s Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction and Creativity and MAGIC Spell Studios. Long is founder and chair of the motion picture science program in RIT’s School of Film and Animation.

An animated film by Rochester Institute of Technology School of Film and Animation (SOFA) students about a poor boy discovering a seed of hope was one of the top highlights of Rochester’s spring film festival season.

Meet Chirag Kular, a computer science graduate student who is working on an innovative research project using augmented reality technology and incorporating the technology of Microsoft HoloLens, Amazon’s Alexa and IBM’s Watson.