Michael Zyda is going back to school. The founder of the MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, has joined the staff at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. Zyda will direct a program to research game-production techniques.
Zyda, who created America's Army, will be the director of the newly created GamePipe Laboratory. The lab will focus on researching and developing next-generation infrastructure, the relationship between cognition and gaming, new ways to immerse gamers in their environments, and gaming as an educational and training tool.
"The mission of the GamePipe Laboratory," Zyda said, "is research, development, and education on the grand challenges of radically transforming the game production process." Zyda will also serve as associate director for the Integrated Media Systems Center at USC.