Faculty of Communication & Design

Centers & Labs

• Infoscape Research Lab
  The Infoscape Research Lab - hosts research projects that focus on the cultural impact of digital code. The lab engages in software and other new media tool development, code mapping, interface design, and new media content analysis. The lab is funded in part with grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Media Research Consortium. For more information on the The Infoscape Research Lab contact the Infoscape Director, Greg Elmer
  
  
• Accessfabrik Lab
  Accessfabrik Lab - is a platform for developing collaborative research projects in the world of interactivity and multimedia design. The Accessfabrik team has been working with national and international partners to develop state of the art communication and design tools. Among our partners are: CITO, Autodesk & Alias, Magna, Fraunhofer IAO, and Daimler Chrysler. For more information on the Accessfabrik Lab contact Michael Murphy
  
  
• Blue-Ray Research and Development Lab
  Blu-Ray Research and Development Lab - was created to further explore Blu-ray as a mainstream medium for education, instruction and as an HDTV distribution medium. For more information on the Blu-Ray Research and Development Lab contact Brad Fortner
  
  
• HDTV Television Studio
  The Rogers Communication Centre houses four TV studios - including Canada's first four-camera HDTV television studio facility. FCAD's audio production capabilities are currently comprised of a bevy of interconnected labs with advanced audio production capabilities that employ six servers to support its back end. Dedicated sound facilities include over fifty audio production computers, five multi-track audio mixing control rooms and an additional nine recording studio's. They are used to record, mix and edit voice, music, radio programs, hybrid radio/television content and produce sound effects for movies and television by employing the Foley process. There are few Universities in the world that can match Rogers Communications Centre's converged facilities in terms of audio, video and Internet/Mobile production capability.
  
  
• SPIRITLive
  The Rogers Communications Centre is home to one of the world's first Internet radio stations - SPIRITLive. Updated in 2009 SPIRT was modernized for an era of IP based audio transport. The rebuild extended its radio automation beyond live to the Internet to include the automatic creation of Podcasts from programs as well as other forms of on-demand downloadable content. The station was also constructed as a modern Radio/Television hybrid environment. SPIRIT provides HDTV quality video distribution via its six camera HDTV video infrastructure to a new campus wide television station -RUTV- that is the worlds first distributed IPTV 1080p channel and is integrated into Ryerson University's digital signage initiative.
  
  
• Electronic Newsrooms
  For broadcast news five Avid iNEWS based electronic newsrooms - comprise over 120 seats that service the news writing needs for Journalism and RTA. Video editing is supported by Grass Valley’s NewsEdit system for journalistic activities while an X-SAN based Apple Final Cut Pro editing system supports craft editing. Students can migrate from their own hardware, editing in either standard or high definition formats to any of the seventy-five+ Final Cut Pro computers located in both the Rogers Communications Centre and the Image Arts building.
  
  
• Advanced Media Lab I
  The Rogers Communication Centre’s Advanced Media Lab I provides 24 hour a day access - to thirty one Blu-ray writable Mac Pro based fibre-to-the-desktop-computers that include After Effects, Photoshop CS4 and the Final Cut Studio 2 package for non-linear editing. Final Cut Studio 2 is comprised of Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Compressor 3, DVD Studio Pro 4, and Color — a brand-new application for professional colour grading —. The Visual Computing Lab provides high powered, networked hardware for the creation of animation using MAYA Unlimited or Macromedia’s Flash software and was one of the first labs at Ryerson to be equipped with a fully integrated SMARTBoard that included software management tools to enhance the teaching process.
  
  
• Hybrid Media Computing Lab
  The Hybrid Media Computing Lab - is located in the Centre and was specifically created for the development of media related to physical computing and mobile applications. Part of the Mixed Reality Production Cluster the lab centres on the use of MAX/MSP and Jitter software employing a combination of fifty 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBooks and MacBook Pro's with 15 inch widescreen displays for the development of interactive multimedia installations. The MacBooks connect to Ryerson's Virtual Application server providing access to Adobe Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, and Stock Photos as well as Maple 11, MATLAB R2007a, Microsoft Access, Excel, Power Point, Publisher, Word, SAS 9 1 and SPSS 15. The lab also contains a plethora of gaming and mobile devices that include an Apple iPod, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS Lite, SONY PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, SONY Playstation Portable, Nokia N800 NSeries Internet Tablet, HP iPAQ hx2490 Pocket PC and an Envision 32-inch LCD TV. The combination of ATSC high definition broadcast WI-FI, Bluetooth and peer to peer in the UPuP environment are establishing new kinds of collaboration networks critical to the next generation media production workflow and design.
  
  
• The Interactive Broadcast Learning Lab
  This lab has been established for applied research in the area of converging digital broadcasting. The lab operates in conjunction with the research component of the Rogers Communications Centre and the graduate program in Communications and Culture. It provides faculty researchers, master's students and doctorial candidates with a living "state-of-the-art" lab for research and advancing their understanding of the interplay of the change agents currently affecting the communications industry. For more information, click here.