MEDIA INNOVATION: PHASE II
The second phase of the WVU Reed College of Media’s innovation efforts will be a 10,000-square-foot Media Innovation Center at the heart of the newly configured WVU Evansdale campus. The Center will be housed in the new Evansdale Crossing building — strategically located near the Arts, Engineering and Health Sciences campuses — allowing for crosscollaboration with disciplines that complement the College’s focus on media and technology innovation. It will serve as a trans-disciplinary hub where students and faculty can experiment in new storytelling practices and develop and test emerging digital and mobile media applications, platforms and products to benefit users and the media industry. In addition to the College’s Media Innovation Center, the Evansdale Crossing building also will host a variety of retail and food vendors, classrooms and student services. The building is expected to have traffic of up to an estimated 9,000 students a day, creating significant visibility for the College’s innovative projects and premier research space. The Center will be an open, Google-like space and include hightech classrooms, hands-on learning labs, a multimedia studio and augmented reality lab, and a media innovation “incubator.” Construction of the Evansdale Crossing building is currently under way. The Media Innovation Center is slated for completion in late 2015.
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WVU REED COLLEGE OF MEDIA ®
1 Main Entry
This high-impact entrance includes a viewing lounge, a “blue sky” ideation room, Studio B and catering bar. It is a large open space that will be used for hosting receptions and other gatherings of up to 100 people. The corridor also serves as a gallery of student work.
2 Studio B & Viewing Lounge
This highly adaptive presentation space enables students to conduct interviews, report and produce news programs. It also can be used to host speakers, presentations and panels that are streamed to the Web.
3 Multimedia / Augmented Reality Studio
The Multimedia Studio will be an advanced space with controlled lighting and sound for strategic communications and journalism work in multimedia and interactive production, including experiments in augmented reality and 3-D photography.
4 Digital Storytelling Hub
This space integrates journalistic practice, audience-building, distribution and entrepreneurial strategies into its core activities and serves as “command central” for a new digital publishing enterprise. Part digital-first newsroom and part brand publishing center, this multi-faceted hub houses the talent, technology and infrastructure to produce highprofile digital media projects.
5 “Maker Co-Lab” & “Hacker Co-Lab”
These “analog-meets-digital” spaces foster experiments at the emerging intersection between the digital and the physical world, such as sensor journalism, 3-D printing and working with drones. The maker and hacker spaces are highly collaborative, welcoming students from the arts, engineering and other disciplines to create hands-on, experimental media projects.