Los Angeles – June 12th-16, 2016 – The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) announced that more than 70,000 people participated in the week’s events, including 50,300 video game professionals, analysts, journalists, and enthusiasts attended this week’s trade show, and 20,000 fans attended E3 Live. The premier global video game event displayed more than 1,600 products from more than 250 exhibitors.

E3 will take place June 13-15, 2017 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

“Gamers were the winners at E3 this year. The advancements in technology unveiled at E3 will redefine entertainment for the world,” said Michael D. Gallagher, president and CEO of ESA, the trade association that represents the U.S. video game industry and owner of E3. “The innovation and creativity on display will propel our industry to new heights and expand opportunities for remarkable growth.”

E3 broke records for social media numbers across all channels, with more than seven million posts on Twitter alone. Instagram had more than 500,000 likes on E3-related posts this month. In addition, more than 42 million gamers watched E3 content on Twitch, the official streaming partner of E3. The Twitch viewership was the highest of any video game convention broadcast on the network.

Also announced during E3, a blue-ribbon panel of industry professionals and experts selected Savannah College of Art and Design as winner of the 2016 E3 College Game Competition with its winning video game, Brobot Beatdown.

E3 is the world’s premier trade show for computer and video games and related products. The show is owned by the ESA, the U.S. association dedicated to serving the business and public affairs needs of the companies, publishing interactive games for video game consoles, handheld devices, personal computers, and the Internet.
For more information, please visit www.E3Expo.com or follow E3 on Twitter: @E3.

Ryan Quon

Cinematic Arts nurtures new voices
The week that the Academy Awards aired, and as so many discussions have arisen recently regarding diversity in the film industry, the International Business Times published a wonderful story on our School of Cinematic Arts, commenting on the strong diversity among the school’s students. The story noted that our alumnus George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson donated $10 million to provide scholarships for African-American and Hispanic students at USC. Their generous gift gives a strategic boost to our already diverse program, and is particularly timely. As digital technology evolves, new opportunities continue to appear, especially in areas such as virtual reality, and the school remains fully committed to preparing the next generation of students to answer these needs.

More and more films today are being released in large formats such as Imax, which take advantage of advances in special effects while allowing theaters to charge more per ticket. And that’s not just in mature film markets — China will soon have more Imax theaters than any country, and one of its media giants, the Dalian Wanda Group, is Imax’s biggest customer. And last month, Wanda reached a deal with Dolby Laboratories to install 100 of the Dolby Cinemas premium product in its theaters over the next five years. USC has its own Imax lab to give its students a leg up. All the seats retract, and students can experiment with making images and see them immediately on the Imax screen, Daley said. “The world they’ve lived in so much of their life has been the small screen, all the way down to the phone,” Daley said. “What are the implications of images that large — what does that do to the viewers? If I’m making animation for the large screen, what do I need to think about?” Daley said these were the questions posed by the speaker at the lab’s dedication ceremony (none other than Steven Spielberg). And just as the school’s students have the ability to develop almost Imaxnative content, they’re also getting a head start on working in a medium pretty much everyone thinks is the next big
thing: virtual reality

By Ryan Quon

Samsung Gear VR

Virtual reality goggles were everywhere at CES, but none more than Samsung’s Gear VR headset that uses one of the company’s Galaxy smartphones for its display. I sat through a demo in Samsung’s booth in which you ride a virtual roller coaster while sitting in chairs that simulate the ride’s movement and vibration, and I have to admit it was shockingly realistic. It may be obvious to your eyes that you’re looking at a smartphone, but your brain still leaves your stomach behind when the roller coaster drops down some steep track.

The good news for photographers and videographers is that the conversation around VR seems to be changing. Whereas marketers used to just talk about the technical capabilities of headsets (and let’s face it, they still will if you give them a chance) we seem to have reached the point where everyone realizes that VR content will be what drives the market. Riding roller coasters at trade shows is fun, but tools that give individual content creators the ability to create unique VR experiences or immersive films should really open up creative possibilities.

The Big Guns: VR’s about to get a lot better, but Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are high-end systems for early adopters
Innovation is very important, but I also think it can be overrated, if nothing tangible gets productized as a result of the effort put in. In many cases, maturity — not innovation — is what makes products real.

In the case of Virtual Reality (VR) the industry is now reaching a point where we can almost grasp maturity. We can see it coming; it is inevitable.

Your average consumer may not be able to afford it for perhaps five or ten years, with current prices at $600 per headset not counting supporting equipment (such as a powerful GPU-intensive PC or gaming console) but the writing is on the wall.

VR gaming will be a legitimate form of entertainment, at least among middle class people, before the decade is over.

We need to ask ourselves about what the potential societal implications of widespread VR technology are now, before it actually becomes a cultural phenomenon — just as we deal with the impact of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices on our culture today.

Modern smartphones have been on the market for almost a decade, but we have only started to understand their impact on human behavior.

Oculus has dominated the VR conversation for years, and with good reason — its hardware and software solutions have routinely been the best. I remember putting a rickety pair of VR ski goggles on my head in a hotel room back in 2013, and it blew me away. Now, the first consumer-ready version is on its way for $600 (£499 or AU$649) in March.

Well, $600 plus a gaming PC that can handle it. The price and pre-order announcement of Rift cast a shadow over the whole show, by design. Is VR not for the common person anymore? Is it a tech toy only? My answer: of course it’s not for everyone. How many people have hardcore gaming PCs?

Brent Bullard and Ryan Quon ventured to Las Vegas representing USC at CES 2016. We found phenomenal gains in the PC world which will only mean greater resolutions, higher refresh rates, stable operating systems, and greater need for high-end visuals. 4K is the monitor of the past, now it is 5K with the push of virtual reality. However, lets start off CES review by introducing our particular favorite booth, ASUS!

To kick off 2016, ASUS ROG put on a show at 2016 International CES in the ASUS Media Lounge, Las Vegas, USA. The latest and greatest ASUS ROG gaming innovations were showcased today, the line-up includes gaming motherboards, displays, desktops, laptops and peripherals. Here is a gallery of the exciting new innovations! Stay tuned for more details regarding each product in coming weeks!

CES is becoming more of an automotive show than anything else. Every year there’s more car companies and more car demos. This year was no exception. The PC industry really needs to have its own show. Thankfully, there are still plenty of nuggets to be found, and Asus showed off some goodies this year.
ROG Maximus VIII Formula
Z170 ATX motherboard for 6th Gen. Intel processors with CrossChill EK Hybrid air/liquid cooling.
Three brand-new gaming motherboards with Aura RGB lighting made their debut:

ASUS MG24UQ Gaming Display
There is a little brother in the form of a 24-inch IPS gaming display with wide viewing angles, superior color accuracy and vibrant colors.

ROG Swift PG348Q Gaming Display
A 34-inch gaming monitor with an Ultra-Wide Quad HD (UWQHD) (3440 x 1440) panel, 100Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-SYNC technology.

Asus won’t be left out in the external graphics department with its new XG2 docking station. The XG2 is similar to Razer’s new Core in that both are USB Type-C docking stations. Whereas the Core uses Thunderbolt 3 over USB Type-C, Asus tells us that it’s using something else entirely—something proprietary. The XG2, says Asus, doesn’t rely on Thunderbolt 3, which would require encoding and decoding of the graphics card’s signal. While Thunderbolt 3′s 40Gb/s speed is fast, Asus tells us the XG2 is using raw PCIe signally. We’ll have to wait to get both units in for some benchmarking to see which one performs best.

Game developers are accomplishing amazing things with computer-generated graphics, and video-game graphics are becoming more sophisticated than ever. Lovingly rendered single hairs, carefully constructed environments, movements created through the use of motion capture — as the technology gears ever upwards, so does what we see and interact with on our screens.

One developer, though, has decided to travel far off the beaten path, using not the latest and greatest in graphics rendering, but techniques nearly a century old. When I sat down to play Cuphead, Studio MDHR’s upcoming game inspired by ’30s-era cartoons, I expected it to be easy.

Its looks are disarming — if you’ve ever seen a cartoon like Steamboat Willie or Bimbo, you get the vibe. It’s hard not to set your difficulty expectations low when you’re fighting a giant, grumpy carrot. Or a pirate. Or boxing frogs, or any of the game’s kooky-but-brutal big bosses.

Cuphead stars the titular hero and his friend, Mugman. It’s a weird game involving a deal with the devil, and it’s the work of brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer of Studio MDHR. It is also a game obsessed with boss fights. During E3 2015, I sat down with it to try out a few for myself. The results were … well, let’s just say that I died a lot.

Jared Moldenhauer, who was on-hand to witness my many failures, explained that much of Cuphead revolves around these fights. You’re free to go solo or fight with a pal; the game adjusts its enemies’ health accordingly. During my demo, I bounced from flying through the sky shooting down a giant bird with a buddy to jumping on tracks and battling a very angry train ghost.In its current form, Cuphead is largely made up of boss fights, the kind that would have robbed 8 year-old me of every quarter in my pocket in short order. That jolly pirate from above is one tough cookie. At the time of this writing, Jared tells me that no one from the press has beaten him. I couldn’t stop trying though. Like Gunstar Heroes and similar old games, bosses have learnable attack patterns, but unlike so many of those older games, each has a deep bag of tricks to pull from. This pirate would call a squid friend to splatter ink everywhere, obscuring my vision. He’d call in a shark attack from off the left side of the screen too, or pull out an umbrella and squeeze little pink bullets from it. Each fight really demands that you pay close attention, and that you have sharp reflexes, just like arcade games of yore.
CUPHEAD e3

Written by Ryan Quon
Edited by Brent Bullard

STAN LEE IS 93 YEARS OLD! WoW…please, while this genuine comic book writer and creator is here with us on this planet take the opportunity to meet one of the last Golden Age Comic Book writers alive!!! This weekend go with something fun and interesting! This Friday and Saturday for a very modest fee of $30.00 for one-day pass or $75.00 for a 3-Day pass visiting …one could really get their inner-Geek on! As a USC graduate I often try to promote undergraduates to step away from their mid-terms for the week and try to do something exciting, expecially the weekend of Halloween.

Todd McFarlane to Appear at Comikaze Expo!
His groundbreaking artwork on Marvel’s Spiderman and Venom turned him into a household name. His creation of Spawn, formation of his own toy company and achievements as an animation filmmaker made him a comic book superstar.

Meet Todd McFarlane, Founder and President of Image Comics, Creator of Spawn and iconic industry entrepreneur Saturday only for a limited signing engagement in West Hall and panel with Stan Lee and friends on the Hot Topic Main Stage.

Meet Deathstroke, Caitlin Snow & Weather Wizard from CW’s FLASH & ARROW
We are stoked to announce that actors Manu Bennett, Danielle Panabaker AND Liam McIntyre will be joining us at Comikaze for photos, signings and PANELS! Manu and Liam can also be seen on Spartacus!

I am very proud to have interviewed Flash star Danielle Panabaker at Comicon earlier this July and she had some very interesting topics about how the Flash is filmed. The Interactive Media Division has always been at the forefront of the behind the scenes technology for movie making, gaming, and innovation. Stan Lee is 93 years old and by all means one must meet and attend his expo. He is one of the few left from the Golden Age of Comic Book writing. Comikaze also will feature writers, artist, and various celebrities.

Attention STAR WARS fans (which is everyone everywhere): Carrie Fisher, Star Wars’ PRINCESS LEIA, will grace the halls of Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo on Saturday October 31st for a special appearance!

As everyone knows, Ms. Fisher – who is also the voice of Peter Griffin’s boss Angela on Family Guy – will be reprising her iconic Princess Leia role in Star Wars: VII The Force Awakens. Carrie Fisher ranks among the most beloved female sci-fi film stars of all time – and all of us at Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo are extremely excited by her presence in the show.

Written by Ryan Quon
Edited by Brent Bullard

Now available!

The Brain Architecture Game is a tabletop board game experience (75-90 minutes) for groups of 4-6 players.

11,000+ people have played the game in teams, from small workshops to large conferences since 2009.

The game was designed to engage policymakers, community and business leaders, health and education service providers, and government officials in understanding the complex science of early brain and biological development – what promotes it, what derails it, with what consequences for society. The game has been played from Alberta, Canada, to Topeka, KS, to the US Virgin Islands, to Europe, in state legislatures and informal science museums, in presentations to various stakeholders, to graduate classes and at CEO conferences.

“There is a special place in virtual reality—we call it Near-Field VR,” says Mark Bolas, “It is the place that is within arm’s reach of a user, and it is magical, as it provides the best stereoscopic and motion cues of VR.” Bolas discusses his recent work coming out of the MxR Studio at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in cooperation with students from the Animation Department, in a WIRED article

This time I’m going to talk about one of my projects. It was the second project in Andreas’ CTIN 543 class. The requirement was, briefly speaking, telling a non-linear story. Generally, our understanding about non-linear is “different choices lead to different consequences”. But due to the restriction with technology, we were not able to give players unlimited freedom; what we could provide were prefab options.

That was not I wanted. In my opinion, although artists were able to create a great story by providing options and corresponding endings, as soon as players feel that “I can’t find what I really want to do in these options”, the system is broken. So how to fix this? How to provide players with infinite freedom, or at least make them feel it’s infinite? Fortunately, I was reading something about postmodernism. In postmodernism theories, one opinion about audiences’ attendance said that audiences’ understanding about the artwork was a vital part of them. To which I totally agree and thus had this idea: Why didn’t I just create linear stories, but let audiences watch them in a non-linear way?

I decided to make an interactive film. I combined together four films, each was mimicking a surveillance camera monitoring a different room of the same house. Three of them were bedroom and one was living room. All four films started the same time and had parallel timelines. Audiences can switch among four cameras to watch the residents move around the house and minding their own business. They could choose to follow a character from one room to another, or just focus on one room to see what’s going on. If they thought they missed anything, they could play back. In this project, I wanted give players “freedom” in both time and space.

To give the sense of believability, all footage was shot from a 45 degree angle, and rendered black and white, as if it really came from a surveillance camera. All sound were muted.

Also, Julian helped me to build the interactive part. We used html5 to manage the playing, because I wanted audiences were able to switch from on video to another at the certain time point continuously, and no existed video player were able to do so. The interface was like:

These films were shoot separately. To make sure there were no bugs when one people walk from one room to another, I used sketch to control the timeline (please forgive my terrible hand-writing):

You can see there were two gaps on each timeline. They were power shortage, which meant I can pause the shooting at the moment. It was because the length of these videos were about five minutes. If I did each in one shot, it would result in many rework. So I split them into three parts each.

There was another advantage about faking CCTV shoots: I didn’t need to record dialogue. Actually, in the original video, you could hear I was reminding what actors and actress should do loudly

Speakers: Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Julian Bleecker, Flint Dille
Time: Wednesday, April 29, 4-6pm
Location: USC’s School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Media Building(SCI), Room 108

For the final seminar of this semester, we will experiment with a prototype learning experience designed to flip the idea of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Whereas MOOCs bring students from outside the university into the academy through a virtual learning experience, we are developing a platform that enables students within the university to venture off-campus and into the most exciting, demanding and provocative worlds of professionals in their field. The prototype uses available technology to create a series of two-way conversations between students on campus and professionals in the field using Google Glass and a customized interface designed to facilitate clarity and intimacy between the students and the professional. The seminar will start with a brief history of Telematics and Telepresence by iMAP PhD candidate Joshua McVeigh-Schultz and then connect to the viewpoint of a guide who will tour us through the remote location.