Chautauqua Interactive Chautauqua Interactive is a client-pitched project focused on exploring new ways to integrate technology into the theatrical performing arts in order to create a more interactive experience for the audience. Present-day theatre has developed into a rather passive art form in which the audience sits quietly and observes the action on stage. A fourth wall has been established through which audience members view the world of the play but can rarely interact with it. Through the utilization of modern technology, our team strives to break the fourth wall separating audience and fiction, and create a theatrical performance piece that is truly interactive for everyone involved. For this project, the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University is collaborating with the Chautauqua International Festival of Arts, which will present its Festival of Arts and Innovation on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY. The goal is to deliver an interactive performance piece that will showcase the potential of the medium, as well as a symposium that heralds the innovative possibilities of technology-based, interactive performance art for the Festival.
	Chicago Public Library: CPeLevated CPeLevated is a client-sponsored project team designing a multimedia, multipurpose center for teenagers at The Chicago Public Library. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation and in partnership with Chicago Scenic Studios, we aim to create an environment in which teens can get excited about creating and not just consuming media. The room will house YouMedia, a workshop-based program run by scholars from the University of Chicago and taught by volunteer mentors from the community. It will also provide a place for teens to hangout, explore new media and develop a greater awareness of the library as a resource. CPeLevated: Designing a new level of experience for teens at the Chicago Public Library.
	Crayon 3D Crayon3D is developing a functional and easy-to-use platform for use with Panda3D. Our end product enables users to create objects by drawing in the air with their fingers, just like the hero of the children's book "Harold and the Purple Crayon." The Crayon3D platform provides the following features: - Head Tracking creates a uniquely immersive 3D virtual space - Finger Tracking allows guests to draw in the air - Our Drawing Engine turns the guests' drawings into 3D objects - A Physics Engine allows the objects to interact with each other and their environment Our well-documented API and demo will help you use Crayon3D to create imaginative games and fanciful worlds in a new way. We intend to provide the platform for use in the ETC's Building Virtual Worlds course, beginning in Fall 2009, so that students can explore the possible applications of these features.
	TeachCraft The most recent generation of students has seen great changes in the technological revolution, thus making them digital natives at an early age. Meanwhile, schools and teachers try to educate using the same elements to teach their classes that they employed in the previous century. The objective of the project is to help close the technological gap between students and teachers, by bringing new ways to use modern technology as support for the class and the teaching process
	FSN Pirates The aim of this project is to investigate, incorporate, develop and implement new broadcast technologies to enhance the experience of watching Pittsburgh Pirate baseball telecasts. The team has become acquainted to the existing capabilities of sports broadcasting in the Pittsburgh region through the Fox Sports facilities. The team will investigate the existing panoply of proven, novel, unique and experimental technologies that exist throughout sports internationally and will apply them to baseball telecasts.
	Growing Interest in Robotics & Learning Technology G.I.R.L. Tech uses robots to intrigue, empower and inspire. Our team of eight students is working closely with the Children's Museum, Girl Scouts Western Pennsylvania and YWCA Greater Pittsburgh to make robotics accessible to a wider audience. Our aim is to create opportunities for young people, especially girls, to engage with robots in ways that are relevant to their lives and will help them build lifelong skills.
	Get in Line 2.0 We all spend hours of our lives waiting – in lines at amusement parks, at sporting events for kickoff, and at restaurants for tables. For most of us, this is a tedious experience and often the primary complaint from guests at venues of all types. Get in Line is a student pitched project at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center working to solve this problem. Last semester, the team designed and implemented a prototype experience for an on-campus show. The queue line was split in two and each side competed against the other using innovative cell phone technology. This semester, the project is taking the concept to the next level by launching an ‘at home’ component, where guests can create avatars that will appear with them in line. They will also be able to track their ‘lifetime achievement’ in the games they have played. The team is also developing new game types as well as looking into additional technologies to create a beyond the line experience. Our goal is to turn waiting into “something worth waiting for”.
	Inspiring Path The Inspiring Path project is a partnership with the NEC corporation, a Japanese leader in electronics and technology solutions and home to the C&C Innovation Labs. The CCIL's purpose is to research the possibilities of how computers and communications will change society in the next thirty years. Because the future of technology is only as good as human inspiration, the CCIL is only as good as the inspirations of its employees. To that end, the CCIL created the "Inspiring Path" to refresh the creative minds of its employees. With a pressure-sensitive floor, screens lining the walls and a speaker system running down the hallway, the Inspiring Path is rich in potential as a place for relaxation, for the sharing of ideas, and socialization. The ETC-Osaka team is tasked with furthering that potential. The team seeks to understand how new ideas form - in the push of the crowd, in the dark sea of a sleeping mind, or the serenity of a quiet moment - and transform the hallway into a crucible where inspiration can spark.
	Souda We will develop several tools for our client, Lockheed Martin, for use with the Microsoft Surface table. We have three goals for the semester. 1. 3D Toolkit: We will build a 3D gesture library for use with the Surface table. Gestures will be designed so that they can be used intuitively in any 3D environment on the Surface. We will also develop a Surface Maps tool. This program will bring Google Earth functionality to the Surface table and allow users to navigate the map with our 3D gestures. Users will also be able to interact with the maps in various ways, such as plotting points or drawing vector shapes. 2. Data Visualization: We will develop a data visualization interface for the Surface table. The user will be able to define a problem and then enter observations including the time and space in which the information was observed. The program will display the level of certainty that a particular observation correlates to an expected scenario. 3. External Devices: We will research external devices that can be used or developed for the Surface table. This may include writing devices, RFID or wi-fi devices, or anything else we find useful.
	Serious Games We are working with Lockheed Martin's Research and Development teams to create a program that will allow Serious Games to be prototyped and developed in an intuitive and efficient manner. This platform will be able to create a multitude of different games and scenarios that can collect information and help visualize, simulate and provide solutions to some of the problems we face.
	Sketch-It-Up! For one to be truly creative, a cheap means of exploring and discarding ideas is essential. Artists rely on sketches to inspire and refine their thoughts before committing their creations to paper, paint, crayon or one of the numerous other mediums. Game creators, for all their time and money spent in bringing an idea to life, have no such sketching process. Even the giants in the game industry use primitive tools like cardboard cut-outs and photo montages to express their game design and game play ideas to other members of the team. To alleviate this state of affairs, we introduce Sketch- It-Up!, an industry oriented, student-pitched project. Using this tool, complex ideas can be easily and cheaply sketched. The inbuilt library of assets lets you hit the ground running and complex AI has been done away with and replaced by something vastly superior – human puppeteers! By its very nature, showing off your game ideas to someone on the other side of the world is as easy as Connect and Load. Let the Sketching begin!
	See-Saw Many critics of MMOs say that they put too much emphasis on Virtual Skills and require little real player skills, such as reaction or rhythm. At the same time, many developers find it challenging to include player skill-based elements in their MMOs. By including player-skill elements, they risk segregating players who feel they cannot compete fairly in games involving real player skills. In this context, Project See-Saw is a research game project aimed at finding the best balancing technique to create a player skill- based multiplayer game. A successful balance technique should help both very skilled and less skilled players find the right challenge and satisfaction in a cooperative multiplayer skill-based game.
	Taomasters Taomasters is a strategic Role-Playing Game with a unique gameplay mechanic based on the written Chinese language. By combining meaningful gameplay, dramatic storyline and stylized art, our team is dedicated to make this game an entertaining, engaging and inspiring experience for players.
	Trino The Trino team is a group of four graduate students and two alumni from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, in residence at Electronic Arts in Silicon Valley, California The Trino team first gathered in spring 2008 to create an addictive and simple game targeting Microsoft's XBOX Live Arcade. In 14 weeks, the team built a vertical slice of Trino, ready to be certified by Microsoft for XBLA distribution and also playable on PCs. Now, in Spring 2009, the team has reunited to evolve Trino into a publishable full-length game.
	WMS Electric Storm After a first successful collaboration in 2008, casino machine heavyweight WMS has returned to the ETC with the aim of continuing to define the future of casino gaming. Items on the concept sheet for this semester include communal experiences, lighting, sound, "4D" effects and other environmental technologies, and whatever else the ETC can come up with. In grand ETC fashion, the project development team consists of a designer-programmer, a programmer-designer, a modeler-artist, an artist-manager, a mixed-media guru and an engineer-of-all-trades. The one-trick one-armed bandit just isn't going to cut it anymore!

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