The RIT Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity

Director Phelps will be giving a TEDx Flour City talk on June 8th about ‘the continuum between student innovation and commercialization coupled with American views on creativity’ [we're still working on a catchy title]. The RIT MAGIC Center will feature heavily as an exemple of the ideas in the presentation. If you would like to attend the event in Rochester, you can apply here for attendance, or just watch the talk online when it is available through the TEDx website.

MAGIC Director Andrew Phelps will be presenting student work at the Adobe MAX conference this year in Los Angeles, comparing game development and technology workflow between WebGL and Flash3D technologies. This work is made possible by the fantastic students that participating in this work on the "Glauntlet" and "Flauntlet" teams, in collaboration with the School of Interactive Games & Media in the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing & Information Sciences. In addition, Director Phelps and Dr. William Destler, President of RIT, will visit Adobe headquarters in the weeks leading up to the conference.

Walter Bender has worked to empower the children of developing countries to learn using technology. The co-founder of One Laptop Per Child and founder of Sugar Labs will share his lessons with educators, social entrepreneurs and technologists during a free and open talk at 7 p.m. April 17 at Rochester Institute of Technology. Find out more in the university press coverage of the event. MAGIC is co-sponsoring this talk with Red Hat, StormFrog, and the Simone Center.

Several faculty affiliated with the MAGIC Center made the news this week, as Associate Professor Stephen Jacobs and MAGIC Lab developer and FOSS evangelist Remy DeCausemaker were interviewed in reference to our work with Open Source Software. In addition, Associate Professor Jon Schull was interviewed for an article on hi-tech business startups and his experience in creating SoftLock. And finally, Associate Professor Evan Selinger was quoted in The Boston Globe in an article on attitudes surrounding the American tax system and IRS implementation.

Red Hat Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, has made a gift to strengthen its support of Rochester Institute of Technology’s new Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction and Creativity (MAGIC). The gift will support Professor Stephen Jacobs’ leading efforts in fostering humanitarian free and open source software work amongst RIT students, staff and faculty. Read more abou this gift and it's impact in the RIT News.

MAGIC is on everyone's mind at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco this week. The announcement of the Center at the panel presentation by Director Phelps (along with speakers from Northeastern, UCSC and USC) created quite a stir, as other universities are interested and engaged in the models we are proposing. The reaction from industry is equally positive, as the Center is begiinning to establish new connections and also find new ways of working with established partners. In addition, RIT's Reporter Magazine also featured the new Center in this month's issue to help kickstart a dialog with students and the campus. And we'll be talking about MAGIC at the RIT GDC Alumni Gathering on Thursday as well!

FOSS@RIT, a program of the Lab for Technological Literacy, and affiliate of the MAGIC Center, participated in and supported the PyCon 2013 python conference in the following ways:

Professor Stephen Jacobs, IGM Faculty Member and MAGIC affiliate participated in a panel on engaging students and faculty in Python and Open Source.

Remy DeCausemaker, MAGIC/LTL Research Assistant was a speaker for this year and students Nathaniel Case (graduate student in CS) Eitan Romanoff (Graduate in CS) Ryan Scott Brown (GCCIS ANSA undergrad) and David Gay (IST undergrad) assisted in running the Open Space program during the afternoon portion of the education summit and the students were general volunteers throughout the day as well.

The RIT Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction, and Creativity (MAGIC), in conjunction with the College of Liberal Arts, is pleased to announce a project between RIT and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to explore the use of games and mobile applications to assist and extend participants understanding and engagement with the Getty’s collection at the Getty Villa. The Getty Villa in Malibu, California is an educational center and museum dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. This multi-disciplinary project is a collaboration by partners across RIT, including Performing Arts and Visual Culture of Liberal Arts and the School of Interactive Games & Media in the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing & Information Sciences. This work will be led by Assistant Professor Elizabeth Goins from the Department of Performing Arts and Visual Culture, and Associate Professor Christopher Egert from IGM. Funding for this work is provided by the Getty Museum, and will support students in the development of an iOS prototype application to explore this topic.

MAGIC is off to the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, CA., as a part of our partnership with the School of Interactive Games & Media at RIT. MAGIC Director Andrew Phelps will be speaking on what it takes to establish a nationally ranked games program, and several other RIT faculty will be attending and presenting. RIT students will be hosting a booth on the GDC exhibit floor, and RIT will be hosting an alumni even on Thursday, March 28th.