Principal Investigator Andrew Lippman
Co-investigators V Bove , Kristin Hall
Project Website http://www.media.mit.edu/groups/ultimate-media/overview/
Visual media has irretrievably lost its lock on the audience but has gained unprecedented opportunity to evolve the platform by which it is communicated and to become integrated with the social and data worlds in which we live. Ultimate Media is creating a platform for the invention, creation, and realization of new ways to explore and participate in the media universe. We apply extremes of access, processing, and interaction to build new media experiences and explorations that permit instant video blogging, exploration of the universe of news and narrative entertainment, and physical interfaces that allow people to collaborate around media.
Ultimate Media is creating a platform for the invention, creation, and realization of new ways to explore and participate in the media universe. We apply extremes of access, processing, and interaction to build new media experiences that are data driven, socially designed, and inherently participatory. We consider narrative entertainment as well as synchronous events exemplified by news and sports. We build exploratory systems that are based on a publication paradigm rather periodic broadcasts: content is released at a specific time and available anytime thereafter, at home and on the move. We base live participation on frame-by-frame metadata obtained in realtime and assembled by view- ers into new perspectives and new content. We also build ways for media to directly interact with the spaces and objects around us.
The context of this research is an environment characterized by new understanding of data, people, sensing, and places. All of these are topics of concurrent research at the Media Lab, and together they technologically underpin the what, who, how and where of Ultimate Media. At present the program is supported by Comcast/NBCU, DirecTV, and Cisco at a level of $500K/yr. We anticipate it to grow to $800K/year in FY 2014. Seven graduate students and two lab PI's (in part) participate. The following brief project de- scriptions outline the scope and current concentration.