About a dozen students presented their interactive products, games, and artwork during the first InterActive Demo Day held at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center April 9. The projects they presented were widely varied but were all designed to explore problems and seek solutions. They included: a collapsible water bottle that can hold as much water as a standard bottle but collapses to be just 3 centimeters thick; an augmented reality storytelling application that tells the story of a man who escaped slavery and was protected in Troy; and a tool called Gutenberg that allows designers to easily experiment with styling text for websites. The projects were developed by students both in and out of the classroom and are all in the development stage—some students created their projects solely to satisfy their curiosity and other students are hoping to eventually develop a business around their idea, they said. The event was co-sponsored by the Department of Communication and Media in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer.
