"It's your stage. You go in there and do, say, express whatever you want to," said Omar Williams, the 26-year-old Temple University graduate in charge of running the camera inside a video booth called the "Freak Box," which was set up outside Take Six bottle shop on College Avenue yesterday.

The video booth is an idea from Dewey Thompson, editor in chief of Alltrue.com, which launches reality video over the web so that users can see real-life video-clips and e-mail their URLs to friends.

In addition to the freak box, the site will soon contain a "reality guide to colleges," with 60-second clips filmed at dorm rooms and favorite study places. Surfers at the site will be able to view a whole "channel" of clips recorded at Penn State or other featured colleges, Thompson said.

The freak box has been touring Universities on the East Coast for the past two weeks. Dartmouth, The University of Massachusetts, Amherst and SUNY Albany are among the schools visited so far, said content production manager Scott Zeitz. Passers-by are encouraged to enter the box and express themselves creatively. T-shirts with Alltrue's logo, a housefly, are handed out as incentive to check out the booth.

Participants receive URLs to their "performances" via e-mail two weeks after the shoot. Particularly interesting clips will later be used in a TV show, said Zeitz.

The box itself is a silver, porto-potty-like monstrosity with blue Styrofoam interior and a bulging plastic bubble surrounding a video camera. During a recording session, the subject is shut inside the booth for as long as he desires.

"I thought it was . . . weird. Unusual. But at the same time, it gave me time to collect a lot of my scattered thoughts about life, school, people, myself. I just talked about myself being happy, school and trust . . . but most importantly, it was fun," said Sapna Singh (sophomore-business administration) upon exiting the box.

Adam Butler (junior-labor and andustrial relations) had a less enthusiastic reaction.

"That is the awkwardest thing in the world. I definitely feel like a freak. I sat there and thought about exactly what I was supposed to say. You kind of feel like you have to say something important. I was thinking about telling a story, but then I realized that probably wasn't what I was supposed to do. It was very weird," said Butler.

The crew of the freak box has had some interesting experiences in the last two weeks, according to Williams.

"Duck porn. This guy went in with rubber duckies and made like a duck porno. This other kid went in and talked about how he decapitated his hamster when he was a kid. Eight to 10 kids tried to cram in at once and they ended up breaking the glass bubble around the camera. That made for an awesome shot, you saw the breaking glass and then these kids' faces just fell, like they thought they'd done something really wrong. They ran away afterwards," said Williams.

"We also had a couple of homeless kids up in Amherst. One kid went in and drank a forty, just to get out of the cold for a little while, you know what I mean? Then there are a lot of people who just go in and tell how depressed they are. There are a lot of sad college kids out there," he said.

Penn State was the last stop on a two-week tour of East Coast schools. The group will be going back to its base in New York City for a week before resuming the tour for another two weeks. In a few months the group will go on tour again and then send the best clips to a production company who will compile the material into a television show, said Zeitz.

For more information on Alltrue, visit the company's web site at www.alltrue.com.