The Advanced Media Lab at NC State University College of Design is a multimedia facility housing the latest in digital hardware and software. Maintained by multimedia professional staff Lee Cherry, Pat FitzGerald and Marc Russo, the facility is used to support innovative and collaborative research projects between the design disciplines as well as the graduate students and researchers in the Master of Art + Design program.
The lab has a wide range of animation and interactive software including Maya, Mud Box, Motion Builder, zBrush, Shake, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and Flash, as well as specialized 3D Match Moving and visual effects software such as Nuke, TrapCode, PFTrack and Maxwell Render. The lab houses multiple suites of Mac Pro computers with pressure sensitive Cintiq tablets. Students have access to high-end, HD digital video cameras and audio recording equipment, a digital blue-screen room, and projection rooms. Current upgrades and developments include a professional sound recording studio, RED Camera and infrared camera tracking systems.
Sponsored studio projects and collaborative research teams focus their studies in the following concentrations:
A new design discipline centered around innovative technologies, services and systems with an emphasis on user experience, form and function. Interaction between people through hybrid/mobile technology with an emphasis on the organization and presentation of data transferred as valuable, meaningful information.
Art and museum installations, location-based sound and visual narrative, navigation systems, physical interface design that enhance the experience based on the behavior of the user and their surrounding environment.
Great modern story-telling is an ancient art coupled with new technology. Current digital design and animation offer capabilities and opportunities not yet explored in the history of interaction and performance.
Commercial game and simulation developers, practices, and technology can be utilized by a wider field of organizations that build and apply models within training and simulations balancing adaptive and natural learning environments.
A crossroads between art, technology and society through the synergistic combination of precision engineering, electronic control, sensory inputs, information design and intelligent systems. These systems can provide users a clearer comprehension of information and a means of distributing knowledge through haptic and sensory feedback.