RIT MAGIC Center

MAGIC Community

The creative community of the MAGIC Center is the heart and soul of our research and development capability, with contributions and interactions from makers and thinkers of many backgrounds and varieties. Our social fabric is combined of four major elements:

Faculty Affiliates
(those faculty from throughout the university that have affiliated with the center)
Partners
(individuals, organizations, programs or groups that we work with beyond the campus)
Initiatives
(broad themes that help drive individual projects and investigations)
Students
(who are the core of any enterprise at RIT, and who are working on these and many other projects as they pursue their education and research objectives)

Together, these elements form a rich tapestry of collaboration and multi-disciplinary exploration that is unique to the MAGIC Center, and that flows across the MAGIC Laboratory and MAGIC Spell Studios divisions. That said, not every project, collaboration, or activity will neatly fit into any of these boxes, and above all there is a very healthy dose of creative chaos that permeates everything we do.

Center Initiatives

The Lab for Social Computing @ MAGIC

The Lab for Social Computing serves as an organizing unit for faculty across multiple colleges and disciplines to work together on research and development projects related to a wide range of social technologies. Outside of RIT, LSC faculty regularly speak at conferences on social computing topics, raising the visibility of RIT as an important player in social computing R&D, with several recent and past projects of note. The lab is directed by Dr. Elizabeth Lawley, Professor in the School of Interactive Games & Media and a faculty affiliate of MAGIC.

The LSC also sponsors talks on campus by well-known authors and scholars in the field of social computing: recent speakers included Kevin Slavin, Thomas Malaby, Julian Dibbell, David Weinberger, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick. In addition, personnel from the LSC help organize the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium in collaboration with Microsoft Research FUSE Labs.

FOSS@MAGIC

One of the most unique initiatives at MAGIC is the FOSS@MAGIC effort, an initiative that originally grew out of the Department of Interactive Games and Media's course in educational game development for the OLPC. Today, FOSS@MAGIC sponsors numerous projects, hackathons, regional get-togethers, birds-of-a-feather gatherings, and events throughout the year in connection with the MAGIC Center, the Golisano College of Computing & Information Sciences, RIT, and external partners. Since 2009, this group has brought FOSS speakers to campus, sponsored professional development opportunities for faculty, housed externally sponsored and faculty and student created research and development projects and has brought an annual regional FOSS conference to the RIT campus on several occasions. Known throughout the region, this group is an active and vibrant part of the Rochester open source movement, and is engaged with a variety of institutions throughout the region and the nation.

The Mobile Zone @ MAGIC

The Mobile Zone at MAGIC supplies mentorship, technical challenges and support for faculty and student projects centered around mobile phone and tablet technologies. The mobile zone is sponsored by a gift from Storm Frog, Inc. who generously places their own staff into the lab to mentor the RIT community.

The Museum Games & Technology Initiative

MGTI @ MAGIC represents a broad focus that explores the way in which digital and interactive media resituate the interactions between the public and the museum. The purpose of the initiative is to develop games to support museum collections and exhibits, media to engage participants with specific pieces or collections, and experiences that reframe the exploration of collections and historical artifacts. The eventual goal of our research is to develop a general model and reusable framework for games and media that will improve the accessibility, experience and public profile of museum collections. Projects are generally developed in conjunction with a museum partner (or partners) and include game and media design, supporting material design and assessment standards. Such projects are the first installment of a much larger research initiative that will evolve by individual development of component blocks.

Projects connected to the initiative have ranged in topic and specific methodology, but are generally exploring ways to: 1.) convince non-visitors to visit through interaction(s) with online tools; 2.) create game experiences within the museums to change the way that visitors interact with the museum collection; and 3.) improve visitor understanding of museum collections via digitally augmented experieces.

The Religion, Culture & Policy Initiative

The Religion, Culture & Policy @ MAGIC initiative cultivates new research, focused on games, religious literacy, the acquisition of cultural practices, and the implication on policy and politics.

How can game systems and interactive media provide insight into religious studies, learning, and cultural production? And how can the study of religion and culture illumine game design and the learning sciences? How might discoveries gained in the pursuit of these questions help to promote religious literacy, improved dialogue, discourse, and policy?

The initiative seeks to unlock answers to these questions through original design and field research in games and simulations as well as through scholarly gatherings, discussions and publications.

The Access & Collaboration Technology @ MAGIC Initiative (MAGIC ACT)

This is a golden age of network-facilitated collaborative innovation and social action. The MAGIC ACT initiative adapts and invents tools and technologies to amplify collective problem-solving, addresses emerging opportunities such as education and assistive technology, and explores the ramifications of such work on design, development, collaboration, and industry. The focus of this initiative is on the ways assistive and collaborative technologies bring together communities, better enable collaboration, and encourage explorations through digital means that were previously not feasible. We seek to forge new ground, implement new ideas, and document best practices.

Current areas of focus for MAGIC ACT include:

Games & Learning at the MAGIC Center

RIT, the School of Interactive Games & Media, and collaborators across the MAGIC Center have a long history of exploring the creation, use, and deployment of games in classrooms and informal learning settings to understand both the learning process and to impact a large number of fields. From the early days of projects like M.U.P.P.E.T.S. that explored how we teach our own undergraduates to code and communicate in digital environments, to games such as Layoff! (a collaboration with the Tiltfactor Lab and part of the Values at Play initiative) that challenge the public on uncomfortable issues surrounding economic collapse, RIT has supported our work in exploring the ways in which games and media can impact the learning process.

Recently, MAGIC has partnered with Second Ave. Software on several Department of Education grants that create games for middle school Science education (Martha Madison's Marvelous Machines being one such example), has continued to engage with the Games 4 Learning Institute, the Games+Learning+Society Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and several other partners and agencies as we continue to push the boundary of how games and digital media can impact learning and engagement.

Closer to home, we have been heavily involved in the creation of the Just Press Play project, which seeks to use game elements and playful learning theory to better equip students in the transition to campus life and academic exploration in a whimsical, yet meaningful way. You can read more about these individual projects, their impact, and related work on the individual pages for these works, and if you have an idea or concept for a game or simulation that impact the learning process, don't hesitate to contact us!