Institute for Creative Technologies

While the collaboration between the United States Military, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley has a long history, this long-term collusion has been cemented and intensified with the formation of the ICT in 1999. A joint venture between the US Army, Hollywood and the University of Southern California, the goal of the ICT is to harness talent from the entertainment and gaming industries to develop immersive training simulations for US military purposes. To date, some of ICT’s key projects include:

• hollywood special effects and game developer talent to develop military simulations for training soldiers in the US military

• recruit the Hollywood Directors of films such as Die Hard and Delta Force to script wargaming and anti-terrorism scenarios

• latest - release of Full Spectrum Warrior (see the war gaming archive), a video game that started out as an army training simulation, on the Xbox Console and PCs in 2004 (in conjunction with THQ and Pandemic Studios). The game has become a top seller.

Wednesday, August 18, 1999, Los Angeles Times

Army, USC Join Forces for Virtual Research Technology: Effort could provide more

realistic military training simulations & better Hollywood special effects

By KAREN KAPLAN, Times Staff Writer

Setting the stage for an unprecedented collaboration between the Pentagon and Hollywood, the U.S. Army today will announce the formation of a major research center at USC to develop core technologies that are critical to both the military and to the entertainment industry. The US Army awarded a contract to the University of Southern California to create the Institute For Creative Technologies (ICT) in order to work with the entertainment and game development industries and computer scientists to advance immersive training simulation.

The primary goal of the new Institute for Creative Technologies is to work collaboratively with the entertainment industry to allow the Army to create highly realistic training simulations that rely on advances in virtual reality, artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies. The entertainment industry is expected to use the technology to improve its motion picture special effects, make video games more realistic and create new simulation attractions for virtual reality arcades.

"It's a marriage made in heaven," said Anita Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Virginia who first proposed that the military and Hollywood jointly develop key technologies in the mid-1990s when she served as the Defense Department's director of defense research and engineering.

In a reversal of roles, government intelligence specialists have been secretly soliciting terrorist scenarios from top Hollywood filmmakers and writers. A unique ad hoc working group convened at USC just last week at the behest of the U.S. Army. The goal was to brainstorm about possible terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats, in light of the twin assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Among those in the working group based at USC's Institute for Creative Technology are those with obvious connections to the terrorist pic milieu, like "Die Hard" screenwriter Steven E. De Souza, TV writer David Engelbach ("MacGyver") and helmer Joseph Zito, who directed the features "Delta Force One," "Missing in Action" and "The Abduction." But the list also includes more mainstream suspense helmers like David Fincher ("Fight Club"), Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich"), Randal Kleiser ("Grease") and Mary Lambert ("The In Crowd") as well as feature screenwriters Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson ("The Rocketeer").15