One's an artist, the other an administrator. One creates virtual worlds—from movie studios to museums—while the other builds partnerships and programs putting the latest technology at students' fingertips.

In the eyes of the editors at Campus Technology magazine, however, John Fillwalk and Phil Repp are two of a kind. Both are among the publication's 2008 Innovators of the Year.

For Fillwalk, associate professor in electronic art and director of Ball State's Institute for Digital Intermedia Art and Animation (IDIAA), the honor comes as a result of his work developing virtual applications in Second Life, the Internet-based virtual world. His groundbreaking course The Aesthetic Camera was the first to provide film students with a range of production experiences created entirely within a virtual studio and is the winner of Blackboard Inc.'s inaugural $25,000 Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds.

Among his latest projects is the addition of a Second Life component to the Las Americas Virtual Design Studio, a collaborative exchange launched in 1998 involving more than 30 Latin American architecture programs and coordinated by Ball State. Previously, participants worked on a common design subject and shared developments through a fairly traditional structure of back-and-forth exchanges on the Internet.

Fillwalk's newest concept, however, is to use Second Life to establish a more conducive as well as communal meeting place—in this case, a virtualized tower with floating petals—as the interface for enhanced and more timely communication and collaboration. The nearly 200 students and faculty members involved in 2008 (and their respective avatars) most recently examined ways that a large hotel to be built in Indianapolis could quickly be converted into a "surge" medical facility in the event of a natural disaster or other widespread emergency, explains Fillwalk, who also is advancing a separate effort to make available much of Ball State's art collection via a newly constructed virtual museum. Already The New York Times has twice accessed images of paintings in the university's collection to help illustrate stories in the newspaper.

Newest teaching tool

Across campus, meanwhile, Repp may be found devising fresh ways to put some of the newest developments in emerging media to the test, including the Microsoft Surface, a dramatic departure from existing concepts of the computer desktop and the way people interact with digital information. Ball State is one of the software giant's few alpha testers for Surface and the only college or university in the country researching its possible applications for education, reports Repp, the university's associate vice president for information technology and concurrent associate professor of art whose own teaching and creative endeavors at Ball State focus on 3-D modeling/visualization and digital presentation.

Employing a camera-based vision system, remote sensing, and wireless transfer technology, the tabletop Surface displays allow multiple users to "grab," move, and otherwise manipulate information with simple gestures and touches. And just as the blackboard and overhead projector were the defining essentials of every 20th century American classroom, Repp predicts that Surface and/or subsequent evolutions of that technology may well become the must-have teaching tool of the 21st.

"You're going to see it used to extend the educational realm of the classroom," says Repp, previously the winner of an InfoWorld award for his collaboration with corporate partner Network Alliance on a digital media storage project. "The fact that someone can see someone else's lecture, their slides, their multimedia content, their conversations, and actually interact with that moves the classroom out of the four walls and into an entirely new and exciting environments."