From September 9-21, 2019, UCLA TFT’s Future Storytelling Summer Institute (FSSI) brought together a multidisciplinary group of graduate students, faculty, staff, and guest mentors to investigate how social impact storytelling can incorporate contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. As with the 2018 session, which used AR to bring audiences into a fantasy world as apprentices preparing to fight for their identities amid border and environmental crises, the 2019 Institute explored a key emerging technology for its potential in social impact entertainment.
FSSI 2019 prototyped an interactive mixed reality (MR) pavilion, as if created for the 2028 Summer Olympics, which will be held in Los Angeles. FSSI participants built a site-specific mixed reality experience designed to pull audiences into interwoven stories of Los Angeles communities.
Led by Professor Jeff Burke, UCLA REMAP researchers developed an MR platform that incorporated machine learning in the analysis, generation, and selection of media in the pavilion, which was conceived and produced by students for test audiences at the end of the session. While developing their own next-generation techniques for socially resonant storytelling, with media technology being developed simultaneously, students were asked to take into account the potential roles for contemporary AI in social impact storytelling.
Funding for the 2019 Future Storytelling Summer Institute was made possible by the Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (UCLA TFT) through a generous grant from the Skoll Center for Social Impact Entertainment at UCLA TFT and additional support from a machine learning research award from Amazon Web Services.
Credits can be found below the gallery.
Click image for a larger view.
STUDENT PARTICIPANTS
Jean Carlo Yunen A.
Sam Amin
Jamie Atlas
Kelly Cheng
Benedict Conran
Carolyn Gage
Madie Hays
Jason Hedy
Justine Law
Urvashi Lele
Darica Louie
Carla Neuss
Jake O’Hare
Ronak Shah
Ryan Stevens
Mark Anthony Vallejo
FACULTY
Jeff Burke — Professor In-Residence, Theater & UCLA TFT Associate Dean, Technology and Innovation
Sean Metzger — Professor & Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies, Theater
GUEST MENTORS
Sean DeYoe and Taylor Fitz-Gibbon — Founders, Spatial Awareness Network
Ana Herruzo — Chair of Applied Computer Science, Woodbury University & Co-Founder/Owner, NaiveLaser
Melissa Roemmele — Research Scientist, SDL Research & author, Neural Networks for Narrative Continuation
Danny Snelson — Assistant Professor, UCLA Dept. of English & author, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats
Jared J. Stein — Senior Research Artist, UCLA REMAP
UCLA REMAP STAFF
Peter Gusev — Lead Developer
Rey Jarrell — Staff Developer
Renée Mac Donald — Production Manager
Blair Subbaraman — Staff Developer
Mira Winick — Production Coordinator
UCLA REMAP / TFT VISITING GRADUATE RESEARCHERS
Daniel Gilman Calderón
Xiaowen Sun
UCLA TFT STAFF
Jonathan Burke
Evey Connerty-Marin
Daniel Gutierrez
Austin Taylor
Paul Timmel
Christina Vacchiano
Aaron Wong
Freud Playhouse, UCLA—2019.