Congratulations to all five teams for doing a great job on the Quarter Presentations. Our audience was made up primarily of ETC Alums who work at Electronic Arts, along with a few key EA movers and shakers - which in addition to all out students made for a nice size audience for the first round of presentations.
Play Social
iLearn
Fluxion
Spike
Mirage
My first visit to Zynga was back in January 2009 during our ETC west coast trip, and my first impression was very deep. Although Zynga was still small in scale and I didn’t play any casual games, especially Facebook games at that time, I could tell that Zynga was going to be a big company some day. They showed keen ambition for recruiting talented people since they held a great greeting party for all ETCers and gave out a free Xbox360 for the winner’s prize in one of their activities. One year later, they still impress me!
Today Zynga has become the number one social gaming company on the web. As usual, there was a dog welcoming us when we arrived there.
Charlie and Charlie
Lead by Merry Ayres, their University Relations manager, we had a quick Zynga introduction, a talk about company dynamics and a Q&A held by ETC alumni who are currently working there. I realized that there is a unique culture living in this company. Everything is moving at a fast pace including their decision making, working cycle, and game updating. Besides, they kept emphasizing the fact that everybody is involved and participates in the producing process. It’s very different from any other big game company.
The Full ETC-SV Team at Zynga
After that, we had a brief tour and took a look at their work space. Each team has its own space and they look totally different from one team to another. However, they do have something in common: every team member sits next to each other. It really reminds me of our BVW bullpen. I guess working at Zynga is just like making another BVW world at ETC. Given an amount of time, everybody in the same team needs to work together in order to get things done. I think that’s why Zynga is appealing for ETCers like me so much.
Fluxion is a student pitched project fromEntertainment Technology Center(ETC) of Carnegie Mellon University. It aims to create an iPhone game using fluid simulation as game mechanics. The main concept of the game is to make use of physics features of liquid to solve puzzles by utilizing the unique input controls of iPhone such as accelerometer and Multi- Touch. The goal of the project is to develop an immersive game experience and to explore the possibilities of innovative game mechanics based on fluid dynamics.
Team members:
Chun-Ta Chen, Jy-Huey(Grace), Lin Wen-Chun(Lynne) Lin, Fei Wang, Bing-Huan(Ben) Wu
Fluxion Team
SPIKE (California Academy of Sciences) Team
Project Mirage is a semester-long project involving development of a new and innovative platform/interface as an entry to the International Virtual Reality Contest (IVRC), a Japanese-based competition held collaboratively with Laval Virtual in France.
Our goal is to develop a projection table that truly displays in three-dimensions and is viewable from all sides. Utilizing recent innovations in fog screen technology, we plan to make an interactive display that gives the same experience for multiple guests and could perhaps even inspire the term “hologram.”
Our inspiration comes from many films and television shows like Star Wars and Star Trek, which often utilized holographic technology such as R2D2’s display unit and the U.S.S. Enterprise’s holodeck.
For more information, please visit our website at: www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/mirage/
Project Mirage
ETC News