USC Institute for Creative Technologies

USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Information
Type	Research institute
Industry	Simulation, virtual reality, virtual humans, computer graphics, artificial intelligence
Founded	1999
Founder	Richard Lindheim
Headquarters	Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Randall W. Hill, Jr. (executive director); Albert "Skip" Rizzo (director for medical virtual reality); David Nelson (director, mixed reality research)
Products	Bravemind, Light Stage, ELITE, One World Terrain, FOV2GO
Parent	University of Southern California
Website	https://ict.usc.edu

The USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is a research institute of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. It was established in 1999 with a multi-year contract from the US Army and is a Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) sponsored by the Army. The Army's aim was to bring entertainment industry techniques to military training; the Christian Science Monitor reported in 1999 that the $45 million grant was meant to "create better combat-training simulators that use the latest Hollywood film technology."

ICT's work in virtual reality and mixed reality reaches well beyond military training. Its Bravemind system uses virtual reality exposure therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Its Mixed Reality Lab, then led by Mark Bolas, built low-cost smartphone headsets such as FOV2GO and employed Palmer Luckey as a technician before he founded Oculus VR. The institute's Light Stage facial capture systems have twice received Academy scientific and technical awards.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Founding, leadership, Playa Vista move, 2024 Army contract, Virtual Iraq/Bravemind papers, MxR Lab and Light Stage award claims checked against ICT, USC, Army, press and journal sources. About review dates.

History

Founding

The institute grew out of a Defense Department interest in using entertainment industry methods for military training. According to ICT executive director Randall Hill, people from Paramount Studios who had worked on Star Trek took part in a 1996 workshop in Irvine that helped lead to the institute, and USC later won a competition to host the Army's sixth UARC. Hill writes that the Army sponsors' mandate was "Go build the holodeck!"

Richard Lindheim, an executive vice president at Paramount Pictures and the founder of Paramount Digital Entertainment, left the studio to lead the new institute. USC's obituary of Lindheim says the institute launched with a $45 million Army contract and that Paul Rosenbloom wrote the winning proposal over a single weekend. It also says that Bill Swartout proposed FlatWorld, which it describes as "an equally futuristic but far more practical immersive virtual reality experience" than the Army's holodeck-inspired vision, and that Lindheim backed the idea.

ICT opened in August 1999 in a rented building in Marina del Rey. Star Trek production designer Herman Zimmerman designed its starship-style interiors. Early projects included the Mission Rehearsal Exercise, a virtual human training system for young officers, and the Joint Fires and Effects Training System (JFETS), which ICT describes as the earliest adoption of virtual and simulated displays to train Army observers.

Leadership and growth

Lindheim led ICT for seven years before co-founding RL Leaders in 2006. On 9 October 2006 USC named Randall W. Hill, Jr. as the institute's head after a search in which more than 100 candidates were interviewed. Hill, a West Point graduate and former Army officer with a computer science doctorate from USC, had been ICT's director of applied research and transition. ICT's leadership page lists him as executive director; he is also vice dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

In late 2010 the institute moved from Marina del Rey into a LEED-certified building in Playa Vista, north of Los Angeles International Airport. The Daily Trojan reported that the new site had a glasses-free 3D projector and a 130-person theater, and that a separate satellite lab was used to build and test games mixing virtual and physical reality. ICT celebrated its 25th anniversary at its Playa Vista headquarters on 19 August 2024.

In September 2024 the Army awarded ICT a new five-year contract worth $181.3 million. The institute said the contract, with a five-year base and a five-year option period, allows up to $362.6 million in research and development funding. In 2018 the Army described ICT as funded by the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command Research Laboratory. ICT's 20-year retrospective says it works with the Natick Soldier Systems Center and the Army Research Laboratory.

Research areas and output

ICT's about page lists eight major science and technology areas: virtual humans, affective computing, vision and graphics, simulation, mixed reality, integration environments, learning sciences and body computing. The same page lists 2,800 peer-reviewed publications, 29 patents and two Academy science and technology awards. Several of its projects have become Army programs of record, including One World Terrain, the Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment (ELITE), JFETS and UrbanSim. In 2024 Hill put the institute's size at 177 staff members and students across 15 labs.

XR work

Bravemind and medical virtual reality

ICT's medical virtual reality group, led by Albert "Skip" Rizzo, adapted game technology for exposure therapy for combat-related PTSD. Network World reported in 2007 that the system was being developed with the Office of Naval Research and was based on Full Spectrum Warrior, a video game developed as an Army training tool. Patients wore goggles and headphones, and the system could add the smell of human sweat, gunpowder or burning rubber. At that point six soldiers had been treated since clinical trials began at the end of 2006. ICT says its researchers reused art assets originally built for games to create environments shown in head-mounted displays.

A 2010 paper by Rizzo and colleagues described the resulting Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan system: customizable scenes of Middle Eastern settings, including a city and a desert road convoy. In an open clinical trial of Virtual Iraq, 16 of 20 treatment completers no longer met the PTSD checklist (military version) criteria for PTSD after treatment.

The later version, Bravemind, is led by Rizzo, Arno Hartholt and Sharon Mozgai. It shows Afghan and Iraqi city, village, mountain and desert road environments in a VR headset and adds directional 3D audio, vibration and smells. A later version was built for patients with PTSD from military sexual trauma, and its most recent version, for people displaced by the war in Ukraine, is a virtual space for social support. ICT says Bravemind has been distributed to more than 170 clinical sites; funders listed by ICT include the Office of Naval Research, TATRC, USAMRMC and the Infinite Hero Foundation.

ICT describes as the largest randomized clinical trial to date a multisite, double-blind study of 192 military personnel with PTSD, published in Translational Psychiatry in 2022. Participants received nine weeks of virtual reality exposure or prolonged imaginal exposure, each with D-cycloserine or a placebo. Both groups improved similarly, with no difference between treatments overall; virtual reality exposure did better for participants with depression, and prolonged exposure did better for those without it. Rizzo received the American Psychological Association's 2010 Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Treatment of Trauma for his work on virtual reality-based exposure therapy for PTSD.

Mixed Reality Lab and low-cost headsets

The Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) was run jointly by ICT and the USC School of Cinematic Arts and directed by Mark Bolas. Bolas and Ian McDowell had earlier built the Wide5 head-mounted display at their company, Fakespace Labs, with Office of Naval Research funding. According to the lab's later director, David Nelson, it was built between 2004 and 2007, had a field of view of more than 150 degrees and cost close to $50,000 to build, with a tracking system that cost about twice as much.

Nelson writes that in early 2011 Jim Blake, the Army's Program Executive Officer for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI), asked the lab to find ways of "disrupting the supply chain" for VR hardware. At IEEE VR 2012 the lab handed out foam-core viewers that held attendees' phones, under Bolas's goal to "give VR away for free", and won the conference's Best Demo Award. It released the FOV2GO hardware and software designs as open source at Maker Faire in 2012 and later built a wider field of view version, FOV2GO-D, and a 3D-printed Socket Viewer. ICT says this work produced phone and tablet based viewers and an open-source wide field of view headset that cut the cost of such displays from $15,000 to a few hundred dollars, and it credits the lab's work with informing "off-the-shelf solutions like Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear" (see Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard). Lab researcher Evan Suma's work also led to the open-source Redirected Walking Toolkit for redirected walking.

Palmer Luckey worked at MxR as a lab technician; ICT, citing a 2014 Popular Mechanics cover story, says Bolas put him on a team already building generations of inexpensive, immersive headsets. UploadVR reported that Bolas hired Luckey to work in the lab. Nelson writes that Luckey left ICT in June 2012 to launch a Kickstarter campaign for a low-cost VR display, and that his company was bought by Facebook for $2 billion less than two years later. Bolas joined Microsoft in 2016.

Light Stage and digital humans

The Light Stage grew out of research led by Paul Debevec at the University of California, Berkeley, published at SIGGRAPH 2000; Light Stage 2 and its LED-based successors were built at ICT. The systems record how an actor's face looks lit from every direction so the face can be rendered under any lighting. On 20 February 2010 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave a Scientific and Engineering Award to Debevec of ICT, Tim Hawkins of LightStage LLC, John Monos of Sony Pictures Imageworks and Mark Sagar of WETA Digital "for the design and engineering of the Light Stage capture devices and the image-based facial rendering system developed for character relighting in motion pictures." Films that used the system included Spider-Man 2, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar.

A second award, a Technical Achievement Award presented on 9 February 2019, went to Debevec, Hawkins and Wan-Chun Ma for the Polarized Spherical Gradient Illumination facial capture method and to Xueming Yu for the Light Stage X capture system. The system uses a spherical array of computer-controlled LEDs that project polarized gradient patterns onto a face, letting cameras record detail down to about a tenth of a millimeter. ICT says the filming techniques behind the New Dimensions in Testimony display of Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, made with the USC Shoah Foundation, were developed using its Light Stage technology.

Mixed reality training

Several ICT training systems combine physical sets with virtual characters. The 2008 Gunslinger project placed a participant in a Wild West set to interact with several virtual characters by voice and gesture. INOTS, a mixed reality environment developed with the Office of Naval Research for leadership and counseling practice, was installed at Officer Training Command Newport in August 2011, and the Army version, ELITE, was tested at Fort Benning in 2011 and later used in leader courses at Fort Benning and West Point. The One World Terrain project, which produces 3D terrain for simulation, is part of the Army's Synthetic Training Environment.

See also

• Mark Bolas
• Palmer Luckey
• Virtual reality therapy