The University of Southern California is taking an academic approach to the growing use of augmented reality as a way to grow and promote entertainment properties. LA Times has a piece on how a new course covering the phenomenon is being offered at the school, considered one of America s top ranked film programs. The course is taught by Henry Jenkins, a former MIT professor and author of books on the influence of digital media on culture. Jenkins has dubbed the term transmedia storytelling to describe the extension of a fictional universe into bits and parts distributed over various forms of media, such as The Matrix storyline extension through the Animatrix series and AR film promotion campaigns for Blair Witch Project and District 9. He calls their appeal as something that taps into the human impulse to hunt and gather, and he says this new media literacy is giving American children a richer intellectual life outside of schools. He also traces the roots of it back to early comics and even classical literature such as the serialized fiction of Charles Dickens.
Read more at LA Times.
