May 5, 2008
Open Publishing Lab Launches & Displays Innovative Projects at Imagine RIT Festival

ROCHESTER, NY (May 5, 2008) – The Open Publishing Lab (OPL) recently opened and exhibited their first projects at the Imagine RIT festival on May 3, 2008. The lab is run by student researchers and professors to create a center that focuses on researching new methods of content creation and developing innovative applications to publish across various media. OPL Projects launched at Imagine RIT include Innovation News and the Social Networking Game.

Innovation News is a virtually instantaneous, cross media newspaper that was used to document the Imagine RIT festival. News was gathered by wifi-connected "backpack journalists" who sent real-time updates to the iNews website from locations around the RIT campus. Stories and photos were submitted using iPhones, digital cameras, laptops, and a variety of other devices. In addition to the website, four print editions of the newspaper were compiled, digitally printed, and distributed throughout the day. To see how the Innovation News team covered the Imagine RIT festival, visit the iNews website.

The Social Networking Game gets players to physically interact with each other through the use of variable data printing and social computing. Over 130 people tried out the game at the Imagine RIT festival! The game works like this:

Players register and get nametags with symbols representing their interests, gamecards, and sheets of 2D barcode stickers representing the information they provided upon registering. Players collect 2D barcode stickers from other players with similar interests, and stick them on their gamecard. At the end of the day, the cards with the barcodes are scanned, allowing comparison against a database and sending results to each player over the web. Each player recieves an e-mail with a link to their unique results webpage, where they can visit other player's LinkedIn and Facebook pages (if this information was provided). Players can then choose to contact the people they met during the day by sending them an e-mail.

Save the date for next year's Imagine RIT festival on May 2, 2009. The OPL will surely have new innovations to unveil!

About the Open Publishing Lab
Based in the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Print Media, the Open Publishing Lab is a cross disciplinary center that focuses on researching new methods of content creation and developing innovative applications to publish across various media.

To learn more, visit opl.cias.rit.edu