Celine Yu, Hank D Wu, Jessica Chon, Michael Naimark, Qianyi Chen, Tian Qin, Wenhan Dou, Yayuan Zheng, Yanru Zhu, Zexing Li
Description
The 9 students were asked to reflect on their confinement environments and express their feelings about it. Though they knew the final project would be in VR, they began with conventional photography. They then learned photogrammetry with their smartphones (mostly using Metashape) and how to export to and compose in Unity, while also writing and recording 30-second personal voice-overs and background audio. They also added simple shapes, lighting, and “camera on rails” movement, then exported to stereo-panoramic video, which we titled and uploaded to YouTube as a 5-minute a 3D 360 video.
Special thanks to David Santiano, our Research Associate for Telepresence!
Hank D Wu
Description
The chief purpose of MediaMoney ties in directly with a relatively new phenomenon: the monetization of social media. Despite rapid changes in the social media landscape, such monetization has remained rather opaque to content consumers. While many consumers now understand that social media can be a real business that drives very real profits, there remains quite a bit of misinformation regarding the quantity of such payments. Some consumers tend to underestimate the revenue generated by social media influencers (likely because few formal transactions ever take place directly between the consumer and the influencer). However, others also validly overestimate revenue, especially after viewing content depicting the lavish lifestyles of such influencers. The reality is much more nuanced. Consuming “free” media on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter is a large part of an important value creation process. Thus, the primary objective of this project is to cut through the opaqueness and shed light on what truly happens.