Video By: Marc Davis, William Tran, Arian Saleh, Erick Herrarte, Anita Wilhelm, Dan Perkel, Ali Sant, Nick Reid

UC Berkeley Garage Cinema Research : View Full Write Up
Design Researcher & Lead Interface Designer

Garage Cinema Research was the basis of much of my research initiatives in interactive media and the powers of systemic metadata systems. As part of this research group during my Master’s studies at iSchool, UC Berkeley, we were focused on enabling daily media consumers to become daily media producers.

With the dawn of the first Camera Phones in 2003, we saw a large opportunity to explore the beginnings of “the first networked camera”. During the following years, we produced a system called Mobile Media Metadata. My role was fulfilled through lead interaction designer and usability/ design researcher responsibilities for the first iteration of the system: MMM1.

The system aims were to capture as much semantic metadata at the point of capture on mobile devices, as possible. Using artificial intelligence algorithms, as well as, face detection software, we tried to guess who, where (semantic point of interest names), and what contextual semblances within the photo.

The next iteration of our work, MM2, learned that using social and heuristic system metrics proved to be much more efficient. Mobile Media Metadata was the basis of Yahoo! Berkeley Labs, which was opened in Berkeley, California from 2006-2008.