Written by: Sasha Rosen Friday, February 10th, 2012 .
Christopher Stapleton calls himself a Creative Venture Catalyst. His goal: to help shape the next generation of experiential learning. In our information-packed interview with Chris, we got a chance to understand his vision for the future of education.
Chris currently runs Simiosys Real World Laboratory, a creative think tank that aims to transform education into compelling entertainment. His work combines story structure, play primitives, and game mechanics with learning theories.
Simiosys Real World Laboratory: Dmitriy Dryagin, Sam Neblett, and Dana Mott
Highlights of Chris’s career include the design and production of Broadway shows, feature films, and theme park rides for the likes of Universal Studios, Walt Disney World, and Nickelodeon Recreations. His research on “Mixed Reality and the Imagination” has been funded by the National Science Foundation, The Department of Education, The Department of Defense, and NASA.
When most people think of virtual reality, they picture the simulation goggles that have been around for over a decade. But Chris’s work with simulation technology is eons more advanced and has far more philosophical depth. Below, he shares some of his thoughts with us.
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You got your MFA at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, then got involved in theater and film design. How did you make the move from fine arts to experiential media?
I never thought I’d be in the entertainment industry. After my education in fine arts, I majored in theater because it limited me least: it allowed me to think like an engineer, historian, artist, performer, anthropologist, scholar, painter, and graphic designer all at once. Then, when I realized I had to make a living, entertainment seemed like the obvious choice. It was only later on, when I was working on theme parks, that I found out about all these people that were working on simulation technology as training for things like surgery and warfare. The concept of using entertainment to train people fascinated me, so I started working with scientists, educators, and engineers to really rethink our approach to experiential media.
Computer Generated Model from early 1980’s: “Olympus on My Mind” musical at the Lambs Theater, 46th St. NYC
I started a Real World Laboratory to explore this idea of training. One by one, things started happening. I designed something for entertainment and the military came by and said, “Hey, we could use that,” and the cognitive rehabilitation therapists came by and said, “You know, we could use that too,” and the teachers came by, and so on. The simulation technology invented for one industry transcends its original application.
Mixed Reality Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT), US Army 2005
I’ve really been doing the same thing all along, but the contexts have changed. I like making memories for a lifetime, whether it’s applied to training, education, or entertainment.
We’re curious about your experience with theme park design – how did that morph into your current work?
Theme parks in the 90’s like Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure were a good lab for me coming out of New York theater, film, TV, and computer graphics. Doing theme parks, I could finally weave together all these different disciplines: story, play, and gaming. But I realized that we spent billions of dollars to create entertainment just to pass time. The story was shallow. When I moved from entertainment into education, the story became infinite. I wanted to reach a lot of people but with depth and breadth that theme parks didn’t have.
"Psycho" Special Effects Show 1990, Alfred Hitchcock Art of Making Movies Pavilion, Universal Studios Florida
After Islands of Adventure, I started a research laboratory at the University of Central Florida to understand more about simulation technology and the next generation of experience. I teamed up with some pioneers at Canon Inc.’s Mixed Reality Laboratory in Tokyo who were inventing novel mixed reality technology. We used it to combine video games with theme parks and museums, to start focusing on a new media paradigm: experiential media.
Experiential media is the convergence of all media to engage all the senses in all directions, dimensions, and realities. Society started exploring experiential entertainment in the 19th century with huge expos and world fairs, but it kind of died when we invented cinema. In the 20th century, all the media technology stopped inviting the audience’s participation.
It seems then that you are trying to change the way we look at learning.
Yes. A lot of schools are seriously deficient. I grew up loving learning and hating school. We have limited our imaginations so much, and our education system has limited how we develop imaginative and innovative thinking. It’s not a matter of making education game-like. The term “edutainment” is like “dinner theater” – while I love dinner, and I love theater, put them together and it’s not really a great dinner and it’s not great theater either. You should be able to combine the two to make it more than the sum of the parts. My goal is to make learning the #1 entertainment genre, because we really made education boring when learning is so exhilarating. The learning experience should be a non-linear exchange of ideas, actions and emotions that stimulate imagination, creativity, and passion. I’m looking to weave these elements together as the core of education.
Christopher Stapleton Hosting IAAPA at his Media Convergence Laboratory UCF Institute for Simulation and Training, 2003
Museums are also lacking when it comes to education. We can do so much more with museums—the challenge is how to tell the infinite story of knowledge in such a finite space. Also, the most important teachers in our lives are our parents, and museums should not only engage and teach the child, but should also guide the parents to help teach them how to be teachers.
Your latest research at the Simiosys Real World Laboratory examines a concept called the Phydigital InterSpace. What is that?
Phydigital is the blending of the words PHYsical, fiDGEet, and digITAL, to melt the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds, and InterSpace is the space in between users and the digital content where the magic of learning takes place. The concept is meant to cause us to reexamine the way we engage with digital technology in a social space, especially in the context of education and the learning landscape.
Playtesting the Phydgital InterSpace in Laboratory, 2011
At some point, I realized that disembodied virtual experiences have to engage the physical too. But the physical display becomes just a one-trick pony—it doesn’t change. You need to merge the dynamic virtuality with a compelling reality that stimulates the space between the participating people to become a social, interactive environment.
We developed the Phydigital InterSpace after working with NASA on a lunar colony experiential learning landscape called Mission: LEAP, which we’re now designing for museums nation-wide. The Phydigital Interspace works to mix up reality, virtuality, and imaginality and combines story, play, and games with grounded theories of instructional design.
Walk us through your current favorite project.
One interesting project is something I did for cognitive rehabilitation called human experience modeling. It involved retraining someone how to make breakfast who had no working memory because of TBI (traumatic brain injury). We used Chromakey painted cabinets with video-see-thru mixed reality goggles so that the patient could see, hear, feel, smell, and taste a virtual version of his own kitchen within the clinical environment, while interacting with real food, appliances and therapists. The same technology was used to simulate, capture and analyze human behavior so to diagnose, design and apply therapeutic solutions. The way we captured his head position and orientations and recorded what he was doing with visual analytics allowed his therapist to better analyze his actions as he attempted to make breakfast. The result was that the patient was eventually able to engage all forms of his memory (long-term, procedural, sensory, etc), to overcome what he was lacking (working-memory), and to relearn simple survival tasks like making a bagel and coffee for breakfast. It was a type of therapy that he couldn’t do in real life, virtual life, or in any other way except in mixed reality. We are currently using the Human Experience Modeling concept to create new methodologies to assess multi-tasking performance for the Navy.
Human Experience Modeler at the Media Convergence Laboratory
Another interesting project is the “Virtual Aquarium.” Participants put on mixed reality goggles and play games with dolphins swimming around that they can talk to and interact with. We used this project to teach people about sonar (the way dolphins see with their hearing). Each player had their own dolphin, and they would communicate with it by shooting a radar signal to tell it to hit a ball, turn right, or turn left. We had one guy put the goggles on and we asked him, “Do you see your dolphin?” He said no, so we told him to look around. He still couldn’t see it. We literally had to tell him, “Turn your head!” before he realized that the dolphin was “next” to him. People are so used to video games where there is little peripheral perception. Most entertainment cuts this off. In the real world, if you walked around like this you’d be legally blind! With mixed reality we can include 360 degrees of perception with all senses to deepen the experience.
Who are your mentors, heroes, role models, and inspirations?
My Mom and Ben Franklin are big heroes (whatever that term means) of mine because they are both accomplished dreamers. My mom instilled in me my passion and curiosity, as well as freed my imagination. Benjamin Franklin, like me, started with storytelling in the media industry and then went into science, and then inspired the democratization of ideas and innovation.
There are also two people that I have always admired related to my field of storytelling and design. One is Richard Taylor from WETA Workshop. He is the person I always dreamed of becoming. He approaches his work, art, team, and world with such joy, creativity and enthusiasm, and I was fascinated with what he created at WETA workshop. I had grown jaded in some ways about the world of fantasy and design, but meeting him made me fall back in love with entertainment production and design all over again.
Somebody I’ve never met who I have always admired is Terry Gilliam. As a designer, artist and storyteller/director, his independent view and artistic signature is so fascinating and his vision and enthusiasm never dies, despite the challenges he has had. He is an inspiration; he lives the hero’s journey as a character himself.
Any final thoughts for our readers?
The real technological breakthroughs of the future have nothing to do with technology; innovation lies in the way we adopt and use the technology. I hope more people open their eyes to transforming theme parks, museums, and entertainment venues more into applied laboratories. Their survival depends on constantly experimenting with new ideas. Designers probably already know this, but everyone else has to get on that bandwagon. We’re so busy replicating what Disney does that we’re no longer truly thinking outside the box.
MGM Experiential Movie Trailer Prototype at SIGGRAPH, 2003
One of the things the entertainment design industry is going to realize is that people who design theme parks are going to be needed for designing hospitals, schools, malls, cities and even off-world colonies. What they do, we need everywhere, whether we realize it now or not.
