Fortunato Depero's Balli Plastici as part of Performa 2009 In NYC Depero Futuristi is re-imagining Balli Plastici, the 'plastic dance' created by Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero in 1918. The marionettes used in the dance encapsulate the Futurist ideal of machinery striving to break free of human control. Our goal is to digitize Depero's puppets and develop a toolkit anyone can use to create their own Futurist-inspired ballets. Our efforts will move the marionettes beyond mere appreciation, propelling them continually forward as living art.
	California Academy of Science The Entertainment Technology Center and the California Academy of Science have teamed up to enhance the experience of guests at the Academy’s new building in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA. The ETC hopes to apply its expertise in entertainment and technology to fulfill the Academy’s mission “… to explore, explain and protect the natural world.” With a planetarium, aquarium, indoor rainforest and a state of the art green facility, the Academy offers a myriad of topics and a plethora of content that is the cornerstone for creating a meaningful experience. Conveniently located at ETC Silicon Valley campus in Redwood City, CA, team will have unparalleled access to the Academy and its resources. For the Fall 2009 semester the team will focus on identifying areas for enhancement and evaluating feasibility. Using this research the team will be able to prototype and lay the groundwork for these enhancements. This paves the way for polished products to be produced in following semesters.
	Educational Electronic Learning Pathways One of the challenges in education today is helping schools and teachers to identify and find a way to integrate emerging games and simulations into the classroom. Through the Benedum Foundation, the ETC has partnered with Intermediate Unit 1, a regional education service which connects the latest in education with specific educational needs and goals, to address this challenge. Educational Electronic Learning Pathways will create a portal that IU1 can introduce to educators. This portal will be a place where teachers can find resources they need and create a community amongst themselves. They will be able to rate and converse about games and new media that can best enhance their classroom experiences.
	innoVidea : Digital Video Library project Trying to find a video among terabytes or petabytes of digital data is analogous to finding a needle in a haystack. Sorting through all of that data poses challenges not only for how queries are performed, but also in how effectively the results are presented. innoVidea, sponsored by Lockheed Martin, is a project at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center and is an extension of the Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science that began in 1994 at a time when digital video was still relatively new. Informedia research applied speech recognition, image processing, and natural language processing to digital video resulting in a more robust video investigation. Our goal is to create a suite of interactive interfaces to enable a general audience to easily browse multimedia representations of the Digital Video Library (DVL), in an immersive environment. By creating a unique browsing experience that is efficient but also fun and informative, we will enable users to identify and exercise pertinent information and eventually empower them to succeed in “finding a needle in a haystack.”
	Fredutainment It is the goal of this project to stay true to the vision of Fred Rogers and provide meaningful, practical information to everyone in society. To this end, the Fredutainment team and the Fred Rogers Center are looking into ways of disbursing this information in an engaging way to the target demographic of home-based caregivers and independent daycare centers. The current team will lay the groundwork for the project and build a prototype that showcases the potential and the social reach of technology based solutions to alleviate this problem. At the end of the semester, a tried and tested prototype will add value to the groundbreaking work being done by the Fred Roger’s Center.
	Bat-Tek The Bat-Tek Project, or more formally referred to as the Batman Technologies Project, is a joint venture between the wildly creative energies of Entertainment Technology Center-Carnegie Mellon University , the technical powerhouse of Lockheed Martin, and the venture capitalists from Wayne Enterprises. Based on popular DC stories of the famous caped crusader, the Bat-Tek team hopes to develop gadgets, technologies and tools that would aid Batman in his quest to bring about justice in a world gone wrong. Focusing on portability, practicality and usefulness the team intends to create proof of concept gadgets from off-the-shelf parts as well as custom builds to solve problems that could arise in potential mission scenarios ranging from hostage rescues to reconnaissance.
	Project iDev Project iDev is a student pitched project focused on developing innovative games for the iPhone and iPod Touch mobile devices, publishing these games to the app store, and building the framework that will enable us to continue creating games as an independent design collective. We are exploring innovative game concepts through extensive game research, rapidly prototyping multiple game mechanics, and embodying the experimental game design mindset. We plan on developing three full games throughout the course of the semester that will build upon what we have learned and created during our prototyping exercises. Our goal is to publish and market these games on our own as well as pitch one of our games to several publishers in the hope that it will be published by a professional organization. We will push boundaries to create innovative games and differentiate ourselves through a focus on exploring the new areas of meaningful play this platform has created.
	Lockheed Martin Serious Games - Atlas Modern day cell phones are useful tools for keeping information within reach, and keeping our loved ones even closer. Yet, even on the cellular phone, there are some features which are considered more useful than fun. The Atlas team , is a partnership between Lockheed Martin and the ETC. Atlas is focused on exploring the potential within the cellular phone, and their aim is to turn two traditionally non-social elements of cellular phone applications into something fun and engaging. We aim to shift attention to the potential of GPS , Photo, and Video capability, Explore new gameplay, and rethink the boundaries for how these interpersonal devices can shape the world around us.
	PANDAI Project Pandai strives to create a highly efficient and desirable collection of videogame artificial intelligence (A.I.) systems for the Panda3D game engine. This student-pitched project from the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) of Carnegie Mellon University aims to improve the Panda3D engine, which is currently lacking any kind of game A.I. framework, by adding to it a collection of A.I. behaviors such as seeking, flocking, and path-finding, amongst others. This addition to the engine will benefit the Panda3D game-development community by easing the process of developing computerized “bots” that behave realistically in virtual worlds both big and small. During the course of this project, the team will be working closely with members of the Panda3D community, including some of the original Panda3D developers, as well as first-year ETC students who will be developing in Panda3D for their Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) class. By testing the usability and functionality of this A.I. repository as it is developed, the team hopes to create a tried and true product that will be a welcome addition to Panda3D.
	Panoptics Panoptics is tasked with exploring how to collect different types of imagery and data, and display it in ways that can be easily understood and manipulated. Collected data might include visible light, humidity, pressure, temperature, location, audio, infrared, night vision, thermal, ultrasonic, audio, and magnetism.
	Lockheed Martin - SpaceCube The SpaceCube is a project sponsored by Lockheed Martin to develop a game based on the new cube satellite technology. The project is also exploring applications and features to use with the cube satellite technology. The objectives of this project are to collect user information, user behaviors, help visualize, simulate and provide solutions to some of the problems the cube satellite developers might face in the future. The SpaceCube team will focus on developing a playable prototype that contains the core gameplay, game mechanics and the complete game design document. Furthermore, the game will be prototyped and developed in an intuitive and efficient user interface which allows users to customize their satellite system. We will also collect user data by allowing them to make decisions or accomplish some goals when they are playing the game.
	Sun Microsystems Project Darkstar Project Darkstar is an open source project administrated by Sun Microsystems. It can be summed up best as follows: “Project Darkstar is a software platform that simplifies the development of horizontally scalable servers for online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications. Its revolutionary design will eliminate serious problems like zone overloading, data corruption, and inefficient server utilization, while enabling new dimensions of play such as evolvable virtual worlds and very large scale battlefields.” – Project Darkstar website (www.projectdarkstar.com) The ETC project “Darkstar” will be making a number of games over the duration of the semester in order to test drive the Project Darkstar system and providing feedback to Sun about what is good, what is not so good and how we think they can further improve it. Further, we will be providing the Project Darkstar server and a python/Panda3d client interface to the students currently taking Building Virtual Worlds in order to get more perspectives and additional feedback on the system. Further we will also learn how easy it is to teach to others, an important usability factor in the real world. Out last goal is integrating Project Darkstar into the Panda3d to provide the engine with networking capability.
	Microsoft Surfacescapes The objective of the SurfaceScapes project is to create a proof-of-concept for playing tabletop role-playing games on the Microsoft Surface Table. We will be using Dungeons and Dragons as a basis for our prototype, with the option for future expansion to other role-playing games. SurfaceScapes will provide Game Masters and players with a set of features to enhance the combat and role-playing aspects of tabletop games. This will include the ability to interact with the digital environment using real objects such as miniatures and provide automated calculations and visual and audio feedback for actions performed by the player and non-player characters. We are taking traditional tabletop role-playing games to the next level, adding a new layer of immersive and intuitive gaming to the Microsoft Surface Table and assisting both GMs and players in enjoying exciting and engaging adventures. SurfaceScapes… what lies beneath.

For a list of past projects and innovations, check out our Project Archives.