Andrew Phelps, departement chair of RIT’s Interactive Games & Media spoke at Adobe MAX to show some of the amazing projects that came out of this year’s senior team project course. Some of these awesome projects include our Sociable Table, Weather the Weather, and Puddle.

Our professor of New Media Design & Imaging also spoke at the Educator’s Conference which focused in depth on our Sociable Table.

Watch the video here: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-develop/student-work-and-curricular-design-at-rit/

Sociable Table made it to one of the 3 finalists in th Non-Browser Based Category, and Cinema Flash made it to the Honorable Mentions in the Photography Category!!!!!! Wooohoooo!!!

Adobe will be paying for a round trip ticket and the hotel for all finalists to spend 5 nights in Beijing to attend the award ceremony, and the Icograda Conference! This is remarkably unbelievable…  This all goes thanks to my teammates for both projects, whom I will be representing in Beijing, to see the final results of the competition!

I submitted couple of my projects to Adobe Design Achievement Awards a month ago. I found out that all my projects; Cinema Flash, Sociable Table, and Eco Hero had become Semi Finalists fot the Photography, Non-Browser, and Browser category! Woo Hoo!!

Many of my colleagues from RIT were in the Semi-Finalists too. Go RIT!

Eco Hero – Save the Broken Planet - was featured on the FWA! Although we didn’t win the award, it’s definitely nice to be recognized by one of the most traffic heavy sites, after all the hard work & time put into the project : )

Our senior thesis project is a 2 quarter project where we get to make anything we want. Our Team Sociable decided to make a table that helped people socialize in bar settings.

After 20 weeks of hard work, the Sociable Table was finally finished & presented at RIT’s major event called ImagineRIT! This is a school hosted festival where students sets up booths to showcase their creative & innovative projects made during the school year. Around 25,000 people attended ImagineRIT this year!

Team Sociable had set up our interactive table installation in a classroom. Since the table was made for a bar, we added curtains, placed a red carpet, dimmed the lights, played music, and served juice to everybody to create a bar atmosphere.

It was rewarding to hear many positive feedbacks, and people repeatedly talking about how Minority Report’s Technology became real. Not only did we see adults playing with the table, we saw that children were also hooked to the table. They seemed to enjoy drinking their Hawaian Punch and playing with the Air Hockey game (a feature of the table) very much lol. It was surprising to see how many people learned the interface so quickly, and decided to teach others how to use the table! This was definitely a sign that our table interface was intuitive, and had a easy learning curve. We always had people crowding the table throughout the event, and the popularity kept on increasing through previous users’ word of mouth.

This is Team Sociable! We are consisted of 4 New Media Designers, and 4 New Media Developers. From the left is Alex Zack (Designer), John Barbagallo (Developer), Luke Alessi (Designer), Andrew Sanjanwala (Developer), Matt Bruce (Developer), Me (Designer), Adam Butterworth (Developer), and Sam Sawzin (Designer).

Our team won one of four $1,000 prizes that were to be given to the most creative exhibit in the festival. We also received the Marge Ruffing Memorial Award, a prize given to the exhibit that displays what RIT is all about — meshing the left and right sides of the brain, including the hospitality aspect of the exhibit.

We’d like to thank everyone who supported Sociable, including Jason Sauers who designed and fabricated the table itself.

If you’d like to see more of our process work please visit our blog.

Further details, visuals of the interface, and a website will becoming soon!

Website Design Award (also know as WDA) included my blog in their collection! I appreciate it very much!!