Defining Cinematic Research – SCA’s research labs are innovating creative, multidisciplinary approaches to problem-solving societal issues.
Research programs define the norm for engineering, medical, and biomedical departments at top-ranked universities, but people are often surprised to find out that the world’s best film school also has a robust research focus. In fact, SCA currently has eleven research institutes that work on innovative applications of cinematic media technologies. The investment of resources going toward SCA research sometimes yields benefits in the form of specific products or technologies, but more often than not, the goal is to leverage the means of cinematic media to solve other problems, such as enabling underrepresented communities to make their voices heard about the gentrification of LA neighborhoods or imagining the office of the future. ...
More recently, Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center mentee Max Orozco, who graduated from USC Iovine and Young Academy in 2020, invented Ready Teddy, a plug-and-play VR "pre-flight" program designed to lessen anxiety in sick kids by exposing them to the sights and sounds of an MRI machine before they undergo an actual radiology examination.
The School of Cinematic Arts also has a direct conduit to industry through its Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), a think tank that counts some of the biggest entertainment, technology, and consumer electronics companies as board members. Founded to facilitate conversations and collaboration around the industry conversion from analogue to digital, ETC now facilitates proof-of-concept projects around innovations like VR/AR, cloud computing, and virtual production, recently producing a white paper about best production practices that emerged from creating during the COVID-19 pandemic. ...
See the full story here: https://cinema.usc.edu/news/article.cfm?id=61581
