ASU looks to the future with new emerging technologies building, faculty, programs

By Deborah Sussman and Sarah McCarty

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ASU is assembling a dream team to train the creative workforce of the future and building facilities that will allow graduates to take advantage of open positions in emerging technology. 

“Everyone is talking about the evolving metaverse and how our lives — work, education, social, cultural — will move seamlessly between physical and virtual worlds,” said Steven J. Tepper, dean and director of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. “These worlds need to be artful and imaginative and create a greater range of human empathy, creativity and expression. That’s why we are assembling the world’s best engineers, artists, designers and storytellers across three cities, with access to every technology imaginable.”

Last December, led by Assistant Professor Robert LiKamWa, ASU students demonstrated how they used virtual reality to explore climate change and presented a class project they developed in Dreamscape Learn, a new fully immersive VR learning system for the ASU community and beyond. Their audience included ASU President Michael Crow and Walter Parkes, the Hollywood producer who is now CEO of Dreamscape Immersive. 

“These emerging technologies will change the future, and ASU will drive how these technologies are applied,” said Jacob Pinholster, associate dean of enterprise design and operations in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Pinholster is the founding director of ASU’s Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center, which is part of the new ASU at Mesa City Center, and head of graduate programs in interdisciplinary digital media and performance design. 

“We don’t know of any other place that has gathered this many people, degree programs, facilities and partners all together for this purpose,” Pinholster said.

The MIX Center, which opened this year, hosts hundreds of students who will be making films, designing virtual worlds and creating immersive media experiences. It houses The Sidney Poitier New American Film School’s production and post-production programs, plus classes in digital media technology, worldbuilding, experience design and gaming from The Design School and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering (both, like the Poitier Film School, part of the Herberger Institute), as well as from the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering and the College of Global Futures.

A trio of new transdisciplinary graduate programs at the MIX Center brings together researchers, designers and engineers to leverage XR technologies, immersive experience design and practices for public impact. 

“The MIX Center aims to bring together the most speculative and imaginative XR and related technologies,” said Pavan Turaga, director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, “for themes like the Future of Work, AI for Social Good, and Design Justice.”

These themes, Turaga said, are high priority for the Herberger Institute and the Fulton Schools, as well as for community partners and external sponsors.

Bob Bonniol, creative director for MODE Studios, calls ASU’s approach “fantastic — the very first entirely integrated approach to the new channels, tools and opportunities of our art forms.” 

The three new graduate degrees are housed in three different schools and include courses from several other schools as well. The degrees — the Master of Science in digital culture with a concentration in extended realities technology; the Master of Science in design with a concentration in experience design; and the Master of Science in futures and design (pending approval) — share a core curriculum, which allows students to build a multidisciplinary team of collaborators. 

Classes include Urban DX: Real Time Urban Digital Explorations, for which the City of Mesa will serve as an urban exploration hub for the visualization of real-time public data, and​​ Worldbuilding Arizona Climate Futures, in which students will work with community partners to co-create and imagine potential climate futures in Arizona through a process of collective co-creation and visualization.

​​“ASU shows a deep-seated commitment to preparing students for the future of work,” said Joanna Popper, global head of virtual reality, go-to-market at HP. “The extraordinary combined curricula being offered across the new emerging media and immersive programs in Los Angeles and the deep slate of new hires who will be teaching at the state-of-the-art facility in Mesa, Arizona, will have a strong positive impact on this nascent industry.”

Among those new hires are Laura Cechanowicz, assistant professor, School of Arts, Media and Engineering and Graphic Information Technology program; Nick Pilarski, associate professor, School of Arts, Media and Engineering and The Sidney Poitier New American Film School; and Ana Herruzo, an associate professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and The Design School.

Artist, designer and worldbuilder Cechanowicz works in research, theory and practice across media, including extended reality and immersive technologies, VR/AR pre-visualization, animation, multimedia installation, narrative and experimental film, and production and sound design. Their talks and workshops have been hosted at Disney, LASER and VRLA conferences and within communities around the world, and their worldbuilding projects have resulted in virtual reality immersive experiences presented at the Sundance Film Festival and in films, critically acclaimed interactive operas, multimedia collections displayed at the Venice Biennale, design frameworks for augmented reality apps and digital multimedia books.

An award-winning filmmaker, Pilarski creates interactive and emerging media stories that attempt to address issues related to historicized poverty and class-based trauma. His research interests include XR and computational media, film and media theory, class, geographic conflict, dialectics, utopianism, phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience. 

Herruzo’s background is in architecture, experience design and real-time interactive media. Her main focus is on incorporating lighting, audio and video with physical environments, materials and human interaction. She is also the co-founder of an art collective called NaiveLaser and the interactive agency VIRTULABS. She said she hopes to help ASU grow its strengths in experience design at the MIX Center. 

“There’s nothing like (the MIX Center) in the U.S.,” said Herruzo, who has been assisting Pinhoster with the center and its programs. “It’s groundbreaking media production. The building can be fully synchronized — everything can be programmed. It’s such an amazing facility.”

The MIX Center is a world-class facility for emerging media technologies second to none. Special features include:

  • A four-story, 3,200-square-foot, 150-person-capacity enhanced immersion studio. 

  • A 5,700-square-foot, 285-seat movie theater meeting Dolby specifications for production facilities and featuring high-end projection and sound. 

  • Some 8,100 square feet of professional-quality soundstages/production studios with top-notch acoustic isolation, an automated lighting grid, advanced camera systems and more.

  • A professionally equipped 1,200-square-foot, high-end recording studio and teaching studio. 

  • Twelve editing bays, two color-finishing suites, a color-grading screening room and three sound-editing suites.

  • A 2,400-square-foot makerspace with workstations for 3D printing, laser cutting, circuit fabrication and more. 

“The commitment to teaching and research around the most cutting-edge immersive technologies at ASU runs true and deep, and nowhere is this more apparent than the extraordinary opportunities afforded by MIX,” said Nonny de la Peña, who joined ASU in 2021 as the founding director of ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program and a professor of practice in The Sidney Poitier New American Film School and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. 

“These emerging technologies will change the future, and ASU will drive how these technologies are applied.”

Jacob Pinholster, founding director, MIX Center

In addition to its home at the MIX, the Poitier Film School, one of the largest, most egalitarian film and interactive media programs in the country, is based on the main Tempe campus and at the ASU California Center in Los Angeles.

The Los-Angeles based Narrative and Emerging Media program focuses on new narratives developed using emerging media technologies such as virtual, mixed and augmented reality in the areas of arts, culture and nonfiction. Students will have the chance to work with industry experts, including de la Peña and award-winning British director Mary Matheson, who mixes the latest technology — mobile, augmented and virtual reality — along with intimate documentary techniques to bring the audience into the heart of the narrative.  

The ASU California Center, the locus for ASU student engagement and activity in California, is housed in the historic Herald Examiner building in downtown Los Angeles. The center was custom-designed with emerging technology curriculum in mind, including two studios, one with a large green screen that allows for virtual reality productions, virtual sets and a control room, and another with a large Planar LCD wall, which allows for immersive film and video shoots.

“Together with the direct connection to the narrative industries through our program and facilities in Los Angeles, ASU is providing extraordinary opportunities to advance the field,” de la Peña said. 

De la Peña is a leader in the field of immersive journalism and XRts. In the spring, she received a Peabody Field Builder Award and was inducted into the South by Southwest (SXSW) Hall of Fame. This fall, she was selected as one of the winners of the Higher Ed XR Innovation Grant. The Higher Ed XR Innovation Grant is one of the core components of a partnership between Unity Social Impact and Meta Immersive Learning aimed at increasing access to AR/VR hardware, high-quality educational content and other resources that will help educators create or enhance innovative XR programs.

De la Peña is also part of the team leading the new XRts Immersive Media Fellowship. Other Herberger Institute faculty involved include LiKamWa, Pinholster and Lauren Ruffin, associate professor of worldbuilding and visualizing futures and a co-founder of CRUX, an immersive storytelling cooperative that collaborates with Black artists as they create content in virtual reality and augmented reality (XR). The fellowship, which is co-run by the Herberger Institute and ASU Gammage and supported by the New American Council for Arts and Design, aims to facilitate and help disseminate work by artists whose experiences are commensurate with the challenges that face BIPOC students, early career artists and entrepreneurs in emerging media and extended reality. 

“Anybody who wants a foothold in this new world — whether you are a student or a company or a community leader — can benefit from what we have put together,” Tepper said.

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