World in a Cell

World in a Cell

IN EARLY 2017, the World-building Media Lab (WbML) led by Professor Alex McDowell at USC School of Cinematic Arts, began this major collaboration with the Bridge Institute, to create a fully experiential virtual world of a single Pancreatic Beta Cell, using the metaphor of the complex systems of a city. The continuing goal is to…

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Spaceship Earth 2050

Spaceship Earth 2050

In 1968 the visionary thinker and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller proposed that humans think of the world as a wondrous spaceship, a shared vehicle with finite and regenerative resources meant to last for eternity. He released this work in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and challenged the world to think in whole-world, regenerative…

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Project Tesseract

Project Tesseract

Project Tesseract envisions a more efficient, collaborative, and immersive future of storytelling. As all media become digital and interconnected, there is a massive shift towards creating storyworlds – brands, franchises and other experiences that flow from film to television to games and beyond, on digital platforms that follow audience behavior and preferences and react accordingly.…

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Dry City

Dry City

Dry City imagines a future in which water has been privatized, commodified, and transformed into currency in the wake of global economic disaster. Inspired in part by the award-winning work of Kunlé Adeyemi and his architecture, design and urbanism company NLÉ, the 2015-2016 world building class of student architects, interactive media designers, musicians, engineers, urban…

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Hopscotch

Hopscotch

In the spring semester of 2015, experimental opera director Yuval Sharon invited a class of six USC graduate students, under the tutelage of WbML director Alex McDowell and teaching assistants Laura Cechanowicz and Brandon Cahoon, to create new experiences inspired by Sharon’s upcoming work Hopscotch. After the runaway success of Invisible Cities, called “the opera…

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The Leviathan

The Leviathan

Under the framework of The Leviathan Project, students explore the boundaries of technology and storytelling and the bonds between them. The World Building Media Lab’s flagship project has housed multiple ventures into new narrative mediums that redefine the roles of creators, creations, and reactors. As The Leviathan Project develops a language for this new storytelling…

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Hay Grant Project

Hay Grant Project

This project is a collaboration between several disciplines: systems neuroscience & sensory psychophysics (Sergei Gepshtein at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies), production design and world building (Alex McDowell at USC World Building Media Lab), architectural and urban design (Greg Lynn at UCLA Department of Architecture and SUPRASTUDIO). Using the computational and experimental tools developed…

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Rilao

Rilao

Built from the DNA of multiple real world cities, the Rilao Project is a vast fictional world initiated and developed by the USC World Building Media Lab and world building classes at USC Cinematic Arts, Media Arts and Practice. It is an expanding collective endeavor of experts, faculty and world building students from universities in…

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