5 cool media projects that just got money to become real

Ideas, they’re a dime a dozen. But when about a dozen get lots and lots of dimes — say, to the tune of $250,000 in total — the ideas stand a much better chance of reaching their telos.
Brooklyn’s NYC Media Lab, based in the Metrotech, and Manhattan-based communications company Verizon teamed up to source promising projects being worked on in New York colleges and give them money and consultation from Verizon executives to help them along.
In all, 14 projects were awarded money from colleges across the city.
We’ll focus here on the Brooklyn projects.
From Pratt comes Auteur, “gestural system that offers the most sophisticated, friendly, empowering, and progressive response for re-empowering users to be directors of their digital/curated lives.” Auteur is the work of Gaia Scagnetti, Jillian Lea Barkley, Kiran Puri, Ryan Schoenherr and Jennifer Sclafani.
Everybody, Everywhere, Everytime is, “a toolkit, system and culture for citizen journalism. Easy and accurate capturing and sharing of experiences, made possible through responsible integration of technology and culture.” It comes from Hyuk Jae, Henry Yoo, Keith Kirkland, Jesse Loosbrock, Dawn Moses, Winnie Wen, YangYang Wang, Kevin Yoo and Elaine Khuu, also from Pratt.

This tool to quickly find eyewitness accounts of news events seems like it could be tremendously useful to us in the media who spend so much time typing different keywords into Instagram:
Witness Video Summarization: A Collective Journalistic Experience “develops algorithms that can generate a comprehensive and yet non-redundant video coverage of a news event from videos captured and uploaded by witnesses.” It comes from Yao Wang, Xin Feng, Fanyi Duanmu and Shervin Minaee of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

From Victor Vina, Rafaella Castagnola, James Tae and Kayla Schroter at Pratt comes Teleobjects, described as “always-on, low-cost, personal, wireless devices which replace and extend mobile apps, occupying small spaces in the home.”

And no exploration into new media without something involving virtual or augmented reality. Connecting People to Robots Using Interactive Augmented Reality Apps uses, “state of the art hardware and software of mobile devices to provide intuitive metaphors and rich augmented reality feedback for users as they control and interact with robotic technologies.” It comes from Jared Alan Frank and Matthew Moorhead, of NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
It’s an exciting time to be interacting with the world around us. Let’s hope those corporate dimes make these devices workable.