MAGICS - National Infrastructure for Humans in Hybrid Realities
MAGICS is a national infrastructure initiated by three Finnish universities: Aalto University, University of Arts Helsinki and Tampere University. MAGICS is a truly unique infrastructure and community connecting science and the arts, combining the expertise of the partners in cognitive neuroscience, art and artistic research, musicology, education, social sciences, management and business, human-technology interaction, computer science, user experience, extended reality, and creative technologies. We are a leading national infrastructure for extended reality, metaverse and measuring experiences.
MAGICS is both a physical and virtual infrastructure distributed to different universities and campuses. Every consortium member hosts one or more physical MAGICS nodes. In Tampere University, MAGICS strengthens multidisciplinary research and education especially in the City Center Campus, connecting research groups from the Faculties of Information Technology and Communication Sciences (ITC), Education and Culture (EDU), Social Science (SOC) and Management and Business (MAB). The Tampere University node of MAGICS is led by ITC, where the main users are three Research Centers: TAUCHI Research Center, Research Centre of Gameful Realities and Taru – Research Centre for Communication Sciences, as well as teaching in human-technology interaction, gamification, game studies, journalism, and theatre studies. The facilities of CIVIT (Centre for Immersive Visual Technologies) at Hervanta Campus are also available through MAGICS.
MAGICS was funded by the Academy of Finland Finnish Research Infrastructure funding in 2020-2021 and presently it applies to be included in Finland’s National infrastructure roadmap (FIRI) established by the Research Council of Finland. In 2024, the MAGICS consortium is being renewed and strengthened by new members. University of Jyväskylä, University of Lapland, and Turku University of Applied Sciences join the Consortium. Local activities are developed in all participating universities.
The infrastructure is available for researchers, students and partners of the universities. MAGICS offers open access for all users in need of its services, such as capturing and producing data for human virtualization, enabling human-technology interaction, or tools for the arts. Details on the type of ownerships of the scientific research data are agreed between each partner organization and specific researchers involved in each project. MAGICS open access policies aim to maximize the impact of the infrastructure in academia and society.