2023 marks a new season of the StoryTrove educational product to improve conversational competency by group collaboration. The experience will help with the following critical soft skills required for the future workforce:
Critical Thinking
Creative Problem Solving
Interpretive Analysis
Team Work
Conversational Competency
and more…

What will our lifestyle be like inhabiting Mars? How can we take you into the latest fantasy film for real? How do you face death and live to tell about it? All sorts of solutions can be imagined.  Most likely, there has been a Hollywood movie about the possibilities.  How do you make that future a reality? Hire an Experience Architect.

Inventing the future

The difference between what Experience Architects do and what a futurist do is the difference between life and death. People’s lives will depend on what Experience Architects create. Where the futurist paints a compelling story about where we might be. An Experience Architect is actually inventing the future using emerging technology to push human experience to all new levels, yet keep participants competely safe. To do so, we need to engage all aspects of their physical, virtual and imagined reality as one world.

MIXING REALITIES

Mixing Realities for the Shared Creative Imagination

In our work, we are looking at real world and off-world problems like how isolation will disable astronauts inhabiting Mars. Yet, those deep-space explorers, living decades into the future, have yet to be born. When starting to invent theme park innovations 10 years ahead means the youngest attendees have yet to be born. In developing human performance for the future warfighter, the DoD looks 20 years ahead when the recruits are only 18 years old. Those recruits have not been born yet. How do you design for those who have yet to be born when the state-of-the-art technology is constantly and rapidly changing?

Liberating the Imagination

While radical innovation is constantly changing the way we do business, the human being evolves very slowly. What the Experience Architect focuses on is the inner-workings of the human being and how do we exploit the emerging technology to push human limits that have yet to be challenged? The key to discovering new limits of human performance is to dive into the deepest levels of the imagination. We are not trying to capture the imagination, we are working to liberate the imagination by engaging the audience as an equal partner.

We have just begun to realize how much more humans can achieve here on earth by not assuming we already know. With virtual prototypes, we can safely test creative leaps into future experiences today. We begin to understand what novel techniques can amplify the impact of future technology. However, its not all about design and technology. Its about both the art and science of expanding the human creative participation rather than trying to pacify them as the media becomes more mesmerizing.

Full Immersion

As Experience Architects, we use all the participant’s senses, in all dimensions, in all directions and all realities (real, virtual & imagined) as one world. That is how our mind and body has evolved and we use simulation and virtual worlds to safely push our perception of reality to do what we couldn’t, shouldn’t and wouldn’t in real life. Virtual Worlds start as a prototyping tool for collaboration that integrates the insights of diverse experts to produce an experience we have never thought was possible.  As we apply these simulated experiences into varying applications, our understanding forms a heuristic of Human Experience Modeling (simulation, capture and analysis) extending our natural abilities. We then apply this innovative tool in each application to see how we can transform lives, save lives, inspire lives, or prepare lives. Instead of extending human limits, we actually help people overcome their own perceived limitations to make life more extraordinary.

As we transform technology; technology transforms us

Each generation seems to start integrating innovations earlier and earlier to reinvent their future social lifestyle. In the case of expanding the capabilities of Virtual Worlds,the whole world is rapidly innovating, simultaneously.  This has never been experienced with a technological innovation before. No one country will lead all the innovative process as before.  Virtual Worlds will transform us in different ways across the global society. This will transform life faster and more drastically. This will begin with those being born within homes instrumented with Virtual Reality as a powerful learning tool. This generation will become the “Virtual Natives.” They will be the children of the amazing generation of parents called the “Digital Natives.” We know them as gamers, bloggers, e-commerce entrepreneurs. With the power of virtual learning landscapes in the home, they will out perform all the generations before. This is where we can begin to change the world for the better by preparing this Virtual Learning Lab for the home. This involves engaging the parent as a teacher.

Designing for the Virtual Native

To design for those who have not been born yet, we look inward to the intricacies of the human experience to see how we naturally feel, think and do things. How do we leverage our hearts, hands and heads to develop empathy with reason to engage each other? How does this technology make us not into super humans, but make us more of who we have always been, but fulfilling more of our true potential? This advancement of being a Virtual Native has as much potential to unite us as to divide us if we don’t think of the integrating Virtual Worlds for all.

Bridging the Virtual Divide

We are beginning to collaborate with organizations such as the Virtual World Society and Goodwill Industry to explore how we can more rapidly advance the human experience for all of society. We need to explore, design and develop all new enablers for this future Virtual Native to lay the ground work to discover the best of what innovation has to offer society. This is not a generational thing, its a paradigm shift for all of society to learn. The future generations will learn to leverage the power of Virtual Worlds to unlock minds and link hearts to innovate a better world.

This takes a forward-thinking Experience Architect to help parents, employers, merchants and leaders to prepare for this tsunami of innovation to transform technological disruption in the liberation of human potential. This will be a matter of learning how to think like a Virtual Native.

Learn more in the release of my latest talk given at the Assembly Required Conference, in Baton Rouge to inspire new possibilities with “How to Think Like a Virtual Native.”

Christopher Stapleton
Co-Founder www.VirtualWorldSociety.org @VRWorldSociety
Experience Architect and Producer, www.Simiosys.com @Simiosys
Info@Simiosys.com
Twitter  @Mixing Realities
SKYPE: Simiosys
Profile: www.linkedin.com/in/christopherstapleton/
Publications: www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Stapleton/publications 

copyright 2017 SIMIOSYS.com

Dean Kamen’s arm prosthetic innovation

https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_the_emotion_behind_invention

People like Dean Kamen are our inspiration. His TED talk “The Emotion the Invention” shares his experience that drives our motivation to transforming great inventions into compelling innovations where they can make a difference. Ih his work, soldiers who’ve lost limbs in service face a daily struggle unimaginable to most of us. At TEDMED, Dean Kamen talks about the profound people and stories that motivated his work to give parts of their lives back with his design for a remarkable prosthetic arm.

Enjoy giving…

https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_the_emotion_behind_invention

The promise of telepresence and social media has come up short in the human connection department. Communicating with loved ones in deep space will take much more than science & technology.  To avert the devastation of isolation suffered by loved ones exploring Mars, we need to find ways to increase the human connection and social engagement between people that are millions of kilometers apart. Just speeding up communications will not fully bridge the emotional divide. Even though asynchronous communication of Social Media has done wonders to connect the world, society has become more isolated than ever.  We need more than the just the genius of technology to form this interplanetary human connection. The current artistry of virtual worlds will require more than capturing the imagination or engaging the heart. We need to explore how one’s own perception of internal relationships can help transcend this chasm caused by sensory and social deprivation in deep space. It will take both art and science to figure out.

Imagination: I will see it, when I believe it!

We sometimes fail to see the power of our own imagination. In our research exploring the innovation process at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), we were interviewing how surgeon’s perceive new technology such as Mixed Reality. Nassir Navab, the Director of the Computer Aided Medical Procedure (CAMP) Lab asked surgeons, “how can technology help you see into the body better?” One surgeon responded, “I don’t need to see it, I need to believe it!”  That one insight has transformed the approach to medical imaging in all subsequent investigations. Instead of just improving the technology’s imagery, they needed to improve how the surgeon fully engaging their own imagination to create accurate mental models.  This is true for any high-performance and high-risk vocations from emergency response to inner city education. How can we transfer this power of imagination to transcend both time and space for human connection in deep space? How can we harness the imagination achieve deeper human connections?

The power of Imagination to Transcend Ourselves

• Have you ever been lost in a book?
• Have you been transported to another time and place watching a movie?
• Have you ever lost track of time while being immersed into a video game?

You are traveling the space-time continuum of story. The author is co-opting your imagination with the stimulus of media to bring you into a creative story-trance between storyteller and story-listener.  This lucid dream-like state is the willing state of the audience putting their highly impressionable imagination to work for the intent of the author.  The mere ink blots on a page, in the form of words, can transport you to a place you cannot reach on your own.  These comforting imaginary-worlds have emotion, but without the pain; The journey is all pre-determined, but is still surprising; Even though the story ends, there is still a lingering story-world that stays persistent in our memories. Our memories remember this as if we had the experience ourselves.

We give too much credit to the author if we think all the power is in the artistry or the medium. Earnest Hemingway realized this phenomenon when he describes the art of a novelist. The writer uses less words to draw in the more of the audience’ imagination to achieve the best work. He estimated that as the author, he only created 1/8th of the story experience; while the reader was effectively filling in 7/8th of the story experience with their own imagination.

People mistakenly label this phenomenon as “the suspension of disbelief.” It is actually the opposite. The author realizes that it takes our full belief system in their story-world in order to construct a convincing fantastical story experience. This is similar to how our subconscious fabricates our dreams. You are giving the artistic license to the author to craft false memories into your mind. As theme park designers, we go even farther as we co-opt the memories that the novel or cinema creates to extend the immersion of the experience. Theme parks engage all senses, in all direction, in all dimensions and with all realities (real, virtual and imagined). This phenomenon is what we call “Painting with the Audience Imagination“.  The audience is still doing most of the work, but not realizing that the magic of the media is to make it seem effortless. In addition, the work of the author and the technology needs to become invisible. We have only begun to leverage this power of the audience’s own imagination to transport them into a deeper human connection .  This is central to our research to help increase the human connection between people through telepresence and Virtual Reality (VR).

The Untapped Power of the Audience’s “Empathetic Imagination” 

In traditional forms of story, the magic of the “story-trance” between storyteller and story listener is similar to a hypnotic or dream state where the media drives the experience. Can we use this power in reverse to help with human participant drive a deeper connection with another person?

The next paradigm-shift for “experiential media” such as Virtual Reality (VR) will be engaging the full heart, head and body of the audience so their experience will drive the media versus the media driving the experience. The audience will be invited to more actively to participate with both the authorship and the agency of the story world. This will transform a “story-trance” into a “story-dance” where author, actors and audience create a form of square-dance of story-world creation. We are just beginning to formulate the artistic conventions, but unlike the birth of former media conventions, we are using both the art and the science of the imagination. This makes our work with partner, Jim Davies of the Science of the Imagination Lab, critical. In his book Riveted, “Why Jokes make us laugh…”

From Trance to Dance in Story Experiences

To reach the next major creative leap in the Language of VR, we will need to engage and exercise the audience’s “empathetic imagination” to equal levels of the author’s “expressive imagination.” On the audience side, the Experience Architecture will converge the physical, virtual and imagined realities into one world. The author on the other side will craft the InterPlay of  “serious play,” “gamification” and “story magic,” as a single medium. The Creative Technologist will procedurally weave them all with the artistry of Augmented Intelligence (the other AI), perceptual computing and Machine Learning. The culmination will be able to mediate between the expressive imagination of the author with the empathetic imagination of the audience to transform storytelling.

In this experiential media, the audience’s empathetic imagination will not be replacing the author or actor, it will merely be inviting the audience’s participation with the authorship and agency in order to intensify their human connection with story creation. This will completely change the way we create and experience social engagement with media that will make it as thrilling as it will be transformative.

Its curious how we have to consider traveling to other worlds to help figure out the power within ourselves.

Copyright © 2017 Christopher Stapleton, Simiosys

Simulated living quarters on Mars (left) compared to solitary confinement (right)

We don’t tell our entertainment clients that hire us to design adventures on Mars about our work exploring real-life on Mars.  The difference between fantasy and reality is so stark, it just may kill all of the enthusiasm of their project.  However for us, the challenge to help alleviate the devastating effects of isolation in deep space exploration will make this one of our most exciting projects. It is pioneering work that will not only help astronauts, but the millions of earthlings that also suffer from isolation in hospitals, on deployment, with disabilities, or that are incarcerated. Eventually, it will change the way we create the next generation of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) experience. It will push our creative development of the InterPlay of story, play and games to all new levels of importance to redefine education and entertainment as we know it now. Innovation is always stimulated by life’s challenges. Isolation is one of the great unsolved problems of deep space exploration that will have devastating effects on even the toughest explorer.

Life on Mars can be a sentence of isolation that has similar effects of being in solitary confinement, society’s most severe punishment before the death sentence. In the figure above, we compare NASA’s HI-SEAS (left) Simulated living quarters on MARS compared with Solidary Confinment (right). With the increase of years of sensory and social deprivation from isolation, our brave explorers face an increasing potential of depression and decline of performance.  Both the human and financial cost is irreplaceable. The most difficult challenge is with addressing the Asynchronous Communication challenge, which is the elimination of real-time communication. It will take 20 minutes for communication to get from Mars to earth, then another 20 minutes to return the message.  When our society can not even wait a few seconds of silent airtime on the radio, television or internet, think about the detachment that will set in between an astronaut and family members.  Earth life is filled with not only the abundance of activities with friends and family, but the endless wonder of our natural and manufactured life on earth. Waiting 40 minutes for a response from an relative is a real kill-joy for any sense of human connection.

Our pioneering work with NASA education and Life Participation Approach to Aphasia (LPAA) has brought us to exploring this issue of isolation in space.  The same challenge of engaging families with education, including those who have lost their ability to communicate due to Aphasia (the lost of language due to a stroke) seek similar solutions. The Space Florida organization has awarded Simiosys an economic innovation grant to help bring these innovations to the marketplace for the sake of deep space exploration. It will be advancing the work of NASA’s ANSIBLE project to develop tools that address isolation in both space and on earth.

With 10 years of experience of bringing Mixed Reality advancements to the marketplace with global entertainment and technology companies, Simiosys possess unique experience and interdisciplinary teams to take this technology to uncharted territory. Our teams include both Experience Architects with over 30 years experience with VR and the fresh young talents of the Virtual Native (those who have grown up with Virtual Worlds). Its not the Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) that excites our team, but it is the testing of the full human potential within Virtual Worlds. Our use of emerging engagement strategies that leverage the InterPlay of story, play and games are able to push that human potential through experiential social learning and transdisciplinary collaboration.

As a human species, we are always seeking endless novelty in experience, but not without the  familiar intimacy of human connection and social engagement.  This will be the future measure of success in the $30 billion VR/AR industry. We don’t wish to keep our emerging research results a secret, but share them to help all of humanity to advance on earth and beyond.

Isolation and “Conversational Story Creation”

We are alone in our own thoughts.

We become a prisoner of our own mind when we can not communicate.

An expression of our ideas and dreams does not make us any less lonely.

We need to bond with one another to expose our loneliness and disrobe our vulnerability.

We need a space, time and exchange to feel safe, to connect and feel a sense of belonging.

Conversations allows us to shed our loneliness and feel safety in the presence of one another.

Stories allow us to feel emotion, without the pain in order to bond with one another.

Creation provides us the empowerment to form our own reality that we share with one another

Our imagination is where our memories, ideas and dreams congregate to form our consciousness.

Our conversation invites others in to explore this frontier between ourselves and the world.

Our participation within authorship, agency and the affection of a listener provides us courage.

Language reduces our communication into an explicit and socially acceptable narrative.

This efficiency has helped create civilizations and connect the world, but can leave us lonely.

Language can become a barrier with the loss of expression and empathy that diminishes our human connection.

A conversation is more than an exchange of ideas, its a deep human connection.

A story is more than the destination, its a journey that transforms.

Where we may be alone in our own thoughts, we are not alone in our imagination.

Our imagination frames our consciousness and relationships to help define ourselves.

Life participation is more than being present, its being meaningful to others.

Sharing, listening, collaborating and bringing affection is meaningful.

Conversational Story Creation takes us where we can not go on our own.

Thank you Janet, Jenn, Dana, Denise, Jim and Eric for the conversation that keeps on giving…

Copyright © 2017 Simiosys

Simiosys™ Real World Labs at the Midland Texas Planetary to apply their StoryTroves™to excite museum professionals with techniques of engaging people with communicative disabilities.

There are many marginalized groups of society that disappear to the general public because they feel unwanted, disconnected or irrelevant to society. People with disabilities, in hospitals, in senior care facilities, in refugee camps, or on deployment are just a few groups that suffer silently from isolation. This seems counter intuitive since social media has made us the most connected generation in history. Yet isolation is a growing epidemic that Science Daily reports as a greater public health hazard than obesity.

How can our museums and technological innovation help diffuse this dangerous trend that leads to more serious health issues? Isolation is completely preventable! As community centers, museums can play a much more important role than just housing collections of artifacts and learning displays. Museums with modern social media can also become a collection of relationships, conversations and social engagements. These community learning centers, regardless of theme, can become more community oriented in a way to help and learn from each other, but they need new tools to leverage.

Simiosys™ Real World Labs ventured to Midland Texas Planetary to apply their StoryTroves™ to excite museum professionals with techniques of engaging People With Aphasia (PWA) using techniques developed by the Aphasia Access, a community of Speech Language Pathologists (SLP). StoryTroves™ is a form of story therapy activity that a) stimulates human connection, b) social engagement and c) exercising of the imagination that provides social stimulation, which enhances both learning and therapy. This is the same approach that is being used by Simiosys to research how to address isolation with astronauts in deep space exploration.  Their research, sponsored by the Space Florida Organization’s international partnership grant, is applying a virtual version of StoryTroves™ to prevent the ill effects of isolation that is anticipated with living on Mars as reported by Florida High Tech magazine this year.

Aphasia is a loss of language, due to a stroke or head trauma. When People with Aphasia visit museums, they are faced with a wall of words (see photo above) that they cannot read and confronted by docents who are uncomfortable dealing with people with unusual speech patterns and that have difficulty finding words. As seen in the photo of the Midland Planetarium session of the Magic Box StoryTrove™, the museum is surrounded by language that isolates them from the wonders of the planetarium experience. However, the StoryTrove™ initiates an engagement technique called “Conversational Story Creation” that stimulates a lively and in-depth communication that goes beyond words. It utilizes authored boxes of artifacts that provoke stimulating stories in one’s imagination.

The StoryTroves™have been used at both the University of Central Florida’s Aphasia House and and Public History Center and are advancing the InterPlay experiential learning strategies that we developed with Dr. Atsusi “2C” Hirumi from the University of Central Florida Department of Educational Science and Human Services.  The InterPlay Instructional Strategy combines the heuristics of story, play and game with grounded theories of experiential learning.

Explore more about our research through presentations given at the Augmented World Expo @AWE

StoryTroves™ and Mixed Reality Aphasia Therapy

StoryTroves™ Storytelling and the Internet of Things

StoryTroves™ and the Language of VR

Copyright © 2017 Simiosys

As much as the idea of Virtual Reality (VR) Arcades excites us, should we not consider that these are two concepts have already died a dramatic death in the marketplace before? So it seems that these businesses and products have come and gone.  Now we are putting them together at IAAPA like we did with fine dining and theater and called it “dinner theater.”  Putting two things together, doesn’t necessarily make them better.  It can make them worse, but its not because either are bad. Its how they are crafted together that is important, We shouldn’t make all the same mistakes and be surprised at the results.

The arcades that survived were the ones that had a social elements mixed with food and merchandise such as Chuck E. Cheese’s or Dave and Buster’s. The arcades who thought it was about the technology created what some call a “coffin industry: One box, one player, one game.” It attracted a small lonely demographic that was not worth taking up prime real estate.

What makes VR popular now and not before is because of the enabling technologies of tracking, resolution, processing power, field of view, etc. at a lower price point. However, this makes for a good consumer product at home, but not necessarily a Location Based Entertainment (LBE) solution. In fact, it can be anti-social slapping a piece of plastic on one’s face and excluding everybody else out of the excitement. Even if you put up a monitor showing what they are seeing, your friends are still once removed from the player’s experience. That is not increasing social engagement and human connection, it is diluting them. Plus the hygiene problem with all the greasy fingers from the food and beverage just adds to the operational hassle.

The reason people leave the home for entertainment, no matter what century you live in, is because they all can enjoy being transported to an escape together. Otherwise, they can watch the entertainment at home. So a LBE with VR needs to consider the guest experience first and layer in the VR where it adds and not diminishes the social engagement and human connection that we all crave. There are so many more ways you can incorporate VR without an Head Mounted Display (HMD).  It is critical to the bottom line that the experience design needs to expand beyond the VR HMD. That is why you need an Experience Architect before buying or building any VR Arcade or LBE (even if you do solve the sim-sickness issue).

An Experience Architect creates memories, not buildings. They imagine the LBE from the point of view of the guest experience.  They design the social experience from how we engage with our hearts, hands and heads, not from the technology, flashing lights and theming. This is something that can’t be rendered in a sketch or watched on a Pre-Visualization video.  This has to be rigorously play-tested with prototypes that can bring together the real, the virtual and the imagined together for affective assessment. VR Prototyping is where VR is most dramatically being used to transform our industry. Prototypes are intended to amplify problems so we can fix them. The standard rendering and or pre-viz video tends to hide these problems to sell an idea, not to prove its value. Pretty sketches do not represent the true guest experience that will be making the long-term Return on the Investment (ROI) in the end.

With VR Prototypes we can create and test the ability to make memories that will bring guests back over and over again. This repeat business is what keeps the doors open to the venue to reach the bottom line of the long-term ROI. When developers are obsessed with just opening the doors on budget and in schedule at the cost of guest experience, the venue will experience a slow death as we have seen many times before. This was seen most dramatically with Wanda’s development of experiences that were suppose to out-Disney Disney.  However, we saw how those venues slowly became empty. As reported by the the Wall Street Journal, this drove their massive divestment of their toxic LBE assets this last year. As an industry, we must learn from our mistakes and not cover them up. We can’t be fooled by the shiny, sparkly things in the window surrounded by flashy lights and carnival music.

VR Arcades could be awesome, but they first need to meet the expectations they set in the imagination of an adoring audience passionate about great out-of-home entertainment. Whether you are the real estate developer, operator or IP owner, hire the Experience Architect first! They can either design you a great experience from the beginning or help create an “experiential make-over” to fix what is already done.

The International Association of Amusement Parks and Amusements Infographic

I have been going to IAAPA for 30 years. It is the largest Theme Park Conference in the world. I have also been going to IITSEC, the largest Military Simulation Conference in the world. They are in the same city at about the same time.  Over the three decades, they have been beginning to look alike.  The key common denominator is Virtual Reality (VR). At IAAPA, the VR HMDs were quite the oddity with the clowns, pitch games and frozen dots that fill the conference, but there was a difference this year.

Talon Simulation, who has been exhibiting VR at IAAPA for years, says the questions are changing about VR. Instead of people asking, “What is that (VR)?” They are now asking “How much is that?”  For being in the VR business for 30 years, I would say that is a turning point.  When they want to buy it, that is adoption! However, I ask,  ”is that true innovation?” VR has been creeping into all parts of the conference since Facebook bought out Oculus.  Consumers realized what immersive, interactive entertainment was all about. Out-of-home entertainment venues are now suddenly interested (or maybe scared of the competition?).

This is the “awkward stage”. for VR in the Location Based Entertainment (LBE) business.  They innovate like the razor business. The razor industry slaps another blade on and calls it “innovation.”  The entertainment industry slaps another “D” on it and calls it innovation. First there is 2D, 3D, 4D rides! Yes, a 5D attraction won an award this year. Doesn’t the 5th Dimension branded that already? In lieu of 6D they now have VR.  So slapping a VR HMD on the old carney rides and arcade games is now called “Innovation!”  REALLY?

The turning point with VR and LBEs is that now there is a demand. That means now we can start innovating creatively with it, not just the technology, but everything from the guest experience to the return on the investment (ROI).  What the industry doesn’t know is that VR, once it is considered strategically and not tactically, it will completely change the business as we know it. Are they ready?  Personally, I don’t think they are because they are calling them VR Arcades.  VR and Arcades are two industries that have already died a slow death decades before.  There will be a whole new experience, business and name for it. What should be call it?

Stay tuned, I have been taking notes on what I see and speaking to people to see how they react.  If nothing else, it will be both scary and wondrous!

IAAPA:

I had a great opportunity to be an Honorary Teacher at the Crooms Academy of Information Technology where I taught “Innovation Skills” all day to five classes of over 20 bright students each.  It was exhausting and exhilarating all at once (how do teachers do it?). These kids are so full of ideas and innovative thinking, which seems to come so naturally in an environment that encourages a student’s full potential.  Each class was so unique and brilliant in their own ways.  These core innovation skills and personalities are not always encouraged in traditional schools and work environments (creative problem-solving,  expressive communication, critical thinking, interpretive analysis, team building, etc.). Creative behavior and expression in more strict environments is often misunderstood as deviant and disruptive (we did get a bit noisy and rambunctious). However, the school was founded by someone who was a powerful voice for an amazing community that can’t be overlooked.

The school was founded in 1926 by Joseph N. Crooms the fifth child of freed slaves. He grew up in Goldsboro, Florida a Freedmen community that was later annexed in 1911 (unscrupulously) by Sanford’s infamous Mayor, Forest Lake. Mr. Crooms founded two schools in the community for African Americans in Seminole County, a highly segregated community. Crooms Academy is now a proud technology magnet school of the Seminole County Public Schools system. I highly recommend visiting the Goldsboro Museum , across the street from the Trevon Martin Memorial in Sanford Florida.