CHCI faculty & students participate in Snap Creative Challenge as part of ACM IMX 2020

Virginia Tech was one of eleven universities selected to participate in the first Snap augmented reality storytelling challenge. The team was led by CHCI member Wallace Lages and included students from computer science and the SOVA creative technologies program. The final projects were presented this summer at the ACM Interactive Media Experiences (IMX) conference. The ACM IMX conference is an international conference for the presentation and discussion of research into interactive media experiences. This year, Snap Inc. (creators of the popular social media app Snapchat) in conjunction with Microsoft and the BBC challenged universities to reimagine the future of storytelling using Augmented Reality (AR). 

Wallace Lages and his students created a project to explore first person stories across AR, desktop and mobile devices. The project started as a collaborative project in Lages’ Spring 2020 Virtual Environment course. Justin Vita, a computer science major, created the initial script and each student in the class was tasked with creating a specific scene. The work continued with a small team over the first part of the summer to polish and integrate all all scenes into a cohesive piece. Besides Justin Vita, this team also included Eric Schoenborn, Jasmine Shah, and Nikita Shokohov from the Virginia Tech Creative Technologies graduate program.  The immersive story was developed to run on PC, HoloLens (an AR smart glasses technology developed by Microsoft), and also Virtual Reality headsets. 

The narrative, entitled “Sentiments” is an interactive story inspired by the experiences of first generation immigrant families. It follows the life of a mother and son as they navigate a strife filled relationship. You can view a sneak peak of the story here.

Wallace Lages is an assistant professor of Creative Technologies in the School of Visual Arts (SOVA) at VT. He also has a courtesy appointment in the Computer Science department. He is a member of the Center for Human Computer Interaction.