Hi, I’m Emily! I’m a first year MAS student in the Object Based Media Group!
While I was in undergrad at MIT, I was a urop student in Tangible Media. After graduating. I spent a year at my dream job working in themed entertainment. I started at Walt Disney Imagineering’s R&D Department in California, then moved to Florida to help implement tangible and digital interactives* at Pandora, The World of Avatar at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Over the summer, I was working on tangible, musical interactives for the Super Nintendo World project with Universal Creative.
Physical space utility is a huge priority in the themed entertainment industry. People travel to places like Universal Studios and Walt Disney World because they want to be completely (physically, visually, and sensorially) immersed in worlds that can’t exist anywhere else.
I would love to create a large-scale, interactive, collaborative storytelling platform that encourages imagination and play. I think it’d be fun to make something magical.
The future looks social and augmented. There seems to be a huge emphasis from the tech world right now to bring consumers out of their homes and into their physical spaces. Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods allows the company to refine, redefine, and socialize their shopping user flow in a physical location. I imagine sometime soon, they’ll begin experimenting with IoT type retail experience that would be portable to other stores. Apple’s head of retail was quoted for trying to refresh the Apple Store experience. They want people coming to their stores and collaborating on larger devices with friends in a social context. Snapchat recently added a map feature that allows users to localize themselves within their physical environment. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s special AR content in the pipeline that encourages users to get out of their phones and into the physical world. I’d love to live in a future of augmented, communal experiences.
*interactives in the themed entertainment industry can be defined as physical and/or digital environments and content that can be influenced by the presence of a user or group of users.