About the project  

The year 2050 has become an iconic date symbolizing the  future, with scientific books, articles and studies setting their sights on 2050 for their future prognostications. 

In 2008, Dr. Richard Weinberg invited five of IBM’s top researchers for a panel session at the USC School of Cinematic Arts entitled “Imagine the World in 2050.”  (See History of Time Capsule project.)

As an outgrowth of that event, and in conjunction with the USC Digital Repository, the USC School of Cinematic Arts is creating a Time Capsule to be filled with a selection of USC student digital projects, "sealed" on January 31, 2025, and opened in the year 2050!

To launch this year-long project, on Friday, April 5 2024, IBM and the Expanded Animation Research + Practice program hosted a panel and participatory workshop exploring future possibilities. 

Watch the Panel and Workshop HERE

We hope the panel and presentations will stimulate creative predictions about what the future might bring and inspire students to conceive of and produce new, original media works envisioning the world in 2050. Whether your vision of 2050 is distopic or utopic, we are looking to support innovative media projects imagining culture, technology, environments, transportation, food, fashion, and entertainment that does not exist, but might in 25 years! 

Countless science fiction genre movies such as Metropolis, Blade Runner, Minority Report, Don't Look Up, Her, Ex Machina, Ghost in a Shell; shows such as The Handmaid's Tale, Westworld, Black Mirror, Watchmen, and Futurama; games like EVE Online, The Last of Us, and Fallout; and immersive cinematic installations like Machine Hallucinations have showcased their creators' predictions of the future.

So, what does YOUR vision of the world look like in 2050?