Hip Hop Project

Creative Director and Co-Principal Investigator
Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, Blacksburg, VA 2014
Funded by the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT)
~Awarded tenure in spring, 2016

For this project, I developed a virtual reality (VR) browser based experience of a hip hop room. The Four Four Beat Project is a digital pedagogies initiative seeded by the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) and the School of Education at Virginia Tech. Four Four Beat Project is rooted in the restoration, preservation, and digitization of original hip hop-based cultural artifacts for K-12 and post-secondary education. This project produced the first hip hop archive located at an institute of technology in the American South. The mission was to make accessible resources concerning hip hop-based pedagogy, praxis, research, preservation, and evaluation.

My role in the project was to 3D scan a hip hop room located in Atlanta, Georgia and then to create an interactive 3D serious game in which participants could move through a space using a browser-based interface and interact with the archives and artifacts in real time.

Collaborators: Joycelyn Wilson (School of Education, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech)