About

Impossible
is a good place to start. 

The Interactive Commons (IC) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) was established in 2014 as a center to connect individuals from across our campus and our region through advanced visualization to further research and education.

We believe that interdisciplinary engagement is the force that compels unique and transformative solutions to our society’s most challenging problems. With a team of developers, artists, professors and business leaders, we are working together to define the future of our university by anticipating changes in the broader world.

Collaborate
+ Connect

An underlying theme of our work is to demonstrate new ways that people could work together in collaborative and productive ways. Unconventional partnerships, e.g. between professors in the Department of Physics and the Department of Dance, have yielded developments in mixed reality (MR) technology that were then applied to neurosurgery mapping devices.

The IC has established several key resources that will allow people to create and work with visual information. All of these are located in the IC's space, which can be accessed through a newly constructed entrance on the north side of the Thwing Building, next to the Tinkham Veale University Center and the Kelvin Smith Library.

Design +
Build

Working with disparate collaborators from across our university, region, and beyond, we design and build custom visualizations that bring the invisible into view. Data becomes tangible, connections become apparent and innovations rise to the surface. We specialize in large, shared-group experiences, and published the first 3rd party app to the HoloLens App store. 

The IC holds the world record in the largest shared-group mixed reality experience, which took place over the course of 8 separate performances of Imagined Odyssey, a co-production with the CWRU Dept. of Dance.

Engineered
Serendipity

The IC is meant to create a place and process to encourage radically different academic disciplines to begin new conversations, exchange knowledge and find new ways to look at complex problems—something that happens today more through happenstance or serendipity. We hope to spark paradigm-shifting innovations that address the big challenges facing our society to make life, and the world around us, better.

This node diagram depicts the collaborative culture at Case Western Reserve University. Each dot represents an individual investigator, and more than 10,0000 collaborative grants link investigators across our campus. The IC endeavors to connect even more of these dots to find collaborative solutions to the complex challenges that face our world.

RECENT PROJECTS

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LATEST PRESS & MEDIA

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CWRU Featured in Microsoft CEO’s Keynote at Inspire 2018

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, featured our ongoing collaboration in quantum computing at the 2018 Inspire conference. Nadella stressed that organizations...
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IC’s Erin Henninger and Mark Griswold Present at Ford’s Next Generation Leadership Annual Conference

The IC’s work in future-focused education using HoloLens was featured at the Ford NGL Annual Conference in Dearborn, MI. The...
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Exploring the History of Medical Education in Florence, Italy

As a medical illustrator turned 3D biomedical artist, the anatomical wax collections at La Specola in Florence, Italy, were a...
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Thoughts and Recollections from the World Economic Forum

Travel Getting from Cleveland to Davos was pretty straight forward: Flight from Cleveland to Dulles, Dulles to Zurich and then...
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HoloLens at Microsoft Build: All About Collaboration

HoloLens at Microsoft Build: All About CollaborationAs expected, HoloLens was the star of Microsoft Build 2016, much as it was...
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How We Got Here

The Interactive Commons (IC) vision started about three years ago. It began as our Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) lab became...