The OPL is researching new methods of content creation and developing open source applications
3E's Mantra: extend enable enpower
The lab has only been an idea for a year and a half. It has an attraction model that has drawn students in to volunteer.
Innovation Festival will occur at RIT sometime soon and unveil some of the labs work.
PROJECTS:
1. Open Publishing Guide (website to guide users through the publication process for people with little or no technical experience) uses Drupal, Vimeo, Flex, JavaScript, and jQuery
2. page2pub (browser extension to grab content from online resources to put into a well formated ad-hoc publiction for print) seeks to annotate not based as much on who its from, but who it's for. uses XUL, XML, ePub, Flex, Flash, Java. Phases: Gather --> Transform (standardize formating) --> Publish. CSS is such a mess on the web, so they strip it out "there's a fair amount of crap". Better to just strip it and fix it later.
page2pub (uses zotero like interface but a user interface expert will take a look at it soon)
Class diagram
controller (in the center to connect the following 4)
ePub conversion (constructor, data, write, converter, read)
gathering (page, metadata, image, selection, constructor) -- user regular expressions, put they stopped coding for a week to look back and examine decisions and decided to change
UI (interface, interface manager)
File I/O (load, new, data, save)
3. the innovation news (iNews) - can you do a newspaper on the hour? (create a virtually instanaeous cross media newspaper) Uses drupal, wireless digital cameras, 2 dimensonal barcodes, Xinet & DALiM, javascript, XML. Stories are wirelessly updated via the iNews website. Input is highly regulated to gurantee metadata. Stories got a unique story code so a photographer and writer could work the same event and maybe never even meet, but it comes together on the site. Software formats the content and cues waiting for char count. editors would do last minute editing and picture tweaking. Editors approves content and it gets published. News is mapped onto Google Earth via GPS coordinates in the source metadata. Content was exported as XML and flowed via javascript into an InDesign template. used iterative model for improvement. 90 volunteers and 3 paid staff.
4. social networking game (sng) - how can print be used as a single point in a larger grouping of multiple connections. Players register for the game and fill out interests (vectors of differentiation). When you play the game you get tag, game card, and 2d barcode are given to participants. You find someone with a matching icon on their card and then trade bar codes with them. It is a social enabling tool - lets a child recognize an interest in an adult and talk. At the end of the game the cards are scanned in and the whole field of play is mapped. The players are then reconnected with the people they met via Twitter or Facebook. They build a connection wheel (like Facebook friend wheel) so you can see your connections. Also they generate data on interest breakdowns. They are interested in selling services because DRM issues will make it harder and harder to sell software.
OPL is looking into the idea of a 3D book scanning so you could do a scan of a delicate book without ever opening it (the ink has a certain thickness, so an MRI could detect that). Also they'd like audacious questions to be asked of them from industry to inform their projects and would like visitors.
There is no mandate, these are self organized scholars.
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