ETC Students featured in Amazon Game Development Blog

Last fall the Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) team 54 choose to use the Amazon Alexa as part of their world in the ‘story round’, and their work is featured in an Amazon Developer blog.  The 5-person interdisciplinary  team of programmers, sound designers, and technical artists developed this experience in 2 weeks for the BVW class.

The students had many different platforms to choose from for their worlds in the class including the HTC Vive, Microsoft HoloLens and Anki’s Cozmo, as well as the standard Kinect 2, PS Move, Makey Makey, and Oculus Rift.  The team choose the Alexa because it made the world more immersive for guest and blurs the lines between reality and the experience the team was creating, said the team’s writer, Audrey Higgins.  Besides the Alexa skills developed by the team, the team also used the Unity Game Engine for the game play mechanics, the Oculus Rift and the Amazon Echo, which allowed the guest to interact with the virtual world and Amazon DynamoDB, a NoSQL database which stored guest state throughout the game.  Pretty impressive stuff, all for a two week assignment.

Great work to Audrey Higgins (writer), Mohammed Tauseef (AWS and Unity integration), Na-Yeon Kim (2D/3D artist), Longyi Cheng (Unity Gameplay programmer), and Shuang You (3D artist).

This semester the Campfire team is using the Alexa Skill Kit (ASK) and the Amazon Echo to explore experiences that create a rapport between the user and AI agent.  The team of four hopes to examine narrative-based design through a combination of traditional story development, artificial intelligence and machine learning.  You can follow the team’s progress in their website.

 

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