…to deepen the relationship between the building and its inhabitants…
The Million Story Building/Building Story project has three interrelated objectives:
- To provide a playful and interactive ambient storytelling system that enables the occupants of the new SCA building to explore the rich history of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
- To provide opportunities for members of the SCA Community to add to or otherwise enrich this system.
- To “accelerate serendipity” by fostering the development of productive connections between faculty, students and divisions within the SCA Community.
These objectives will be achieved by the following means:
- Interactive “easter eggs” placed throughout the new SCA building. These easter eggs will take a variety of forms, each of which features some kind of computational mediation. Some of the proposed easter eggs include:-a series of location-embedded QR code glyphs that trigger the playback (on mobile devices or screens) of interviews or other media materials concerning the history and output of the SCA and its alumni;
- Profile-sensitive sensors and affiliated display systems for on-the-fly “social discovery” within the building. Building on the existing SCA Community infrastructure, student and faculty profiles and status updates will be linked to the new SCA Building system. By connecting this data to RFID tags or cell phone numbers associated with individual SCA Community members, the proposed system will enable students and faculty to share information across screens and mobile devices through the local WiFi network. For example, a production student seeking a writer could consult the system to find writers with unproduced scripts; faculty members wishing to make announcements to subsets of students or other faculty could do so by submitting these announcements to the SCA Community; and so on. The Building would “render” this information in a variety of ways, including display on screens, broadcast to mobile devices and posting on the SCA Community website.
- An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) linking together the various elements and motivating the exploration of SCA history. As visitors, students, faculty and other building occupants examine the various easter eggs and other media artifacts embedded in the structure, a fictional “story” will emerge, a mystery that will require a deeper investigation into the SCA’s history (and its place in in the history of Los Angeles and the world at large) in order to solve. This story will involve additional “secret” media artifacts that will be accessible only after puzzles involving the easter eggs embedded in the building are solved.