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!

Sociable Table from Ayaka Ito on Vimeo.

Luke, one of our designer made the reel for our Sociable Table! It highlights many of the features of the table – check it out XD

Visitors will approach a touch-screen tabletop where they will be served the beverage of their choice and given the opportunity to mingle with the other guests. This drink (specifically the glass), will be their link to the table and will identify them during their session. They will be presented with the option to play (or join) games, send messages, and doodle (among other possibilities). The social connections they make will be visualized alongside their drinks through the use of an animated avatar. The Sociable Table was created from the Reactivision technology, and built from scratch. Team Sociable is Adam Butterworth, Ayaka Ito, Luke Alessi, Sam Sawzin, Alex Zack, Matt Bruce, Andrew Sanjanwala, and John Barbagallo.

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!

We tweaked the colors alittle to fit the color settings on the projection table. The most surprising thing was that, the green on the green interface is closer to cyan on screen, but it is closer to yellow-green on the projector!

Sam’s ambience came out really cool! Can’t wait to see all the pieces moving on the table!