Archive for April, 2009

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California Academy of Sciences

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 posted by carl

On Monday we took a field trip to the California Academy of Sciences, where we were treated to a fantastic behind the scenes tour by Tom Kennedy. This was our first visit to the Academy which reopened last September (2008) after its closure due to damage from the Loma Prieta earthquake. The new eco-friendly facility includes the Morrison Planetarium, the Steinhart Aquarium, the Museum of Natural History, a four story Rain Forest, a Naturalist Center, a host of other displays, and it plays host to a large team of researchers.

We all came away very inspired by the Academy and its mission – “to explore, explain and protect the natural world.”

California Academy of Sciences

Outside the Academy

Posted in Elective Class, Field Trips, Group Photos, Spring '09 | Comments Off

Sunny Afternoon at Google

Sunday, April 19th, 2009 posted by soo
Google

Visiting Google

Google9

Derek Parham

On 16th of April, on a sunny day, we all went down to Mountain View to visit Derek Parham at Google. Derek is an ETCer who took the BVW class while he was a CMU undergrad. Derek started to work at Google right after graduation. He’s been working in Google apps for four years now and he saw the company size grow from 3000 to quadruple that over the years.

We’ve heard so many good stories about how the work environment is very “different” from typical corporations. When we walked into a building to register for the visit, the first thing popped into my eyes was the “massage chair.” That was the very beginning of the nice surprises through the tour. There was free food everywhere, massage chairs and pool tables everywhere we went. “At Google, we say you can’t be more than 100 feet away from the food,” Derek chuckled.

We saw two men walking a dog while walking on a trail to another building. After we passed them, Derek told us that one of the men was actually a vice president of the company, and what we saw was a “meeting on a walk.”

The building interior is designed to best encourage people to think creatively and think outside the box. Instead of putting ugly cubicles into the office space, they use white tents that have good ventilation and also provide a nice seal for soundproofing. Your dogs can still be your companion if they help you to relax and work better. Google lets you focus on the job by helping to remove and solve problems (whatever the errands or things waiting back at home for you to come home and fix) so that you can focus and be the best at what you can do. It was a very unusual experience.

There were so many details that Google clearly tries to do different from most companies. Google clearly established their own culture and it helps them to get the creativity out with more degrees of freedom.

20% project was a clear example we observed during the visit. Googlers have a day (20% out of 5 days at work) to work on something else than what they’re hired to work on. It can be ANYTHING that they have a desire to make. Apparently, people always tend to spend some time on their own, so instead of trying to stop people from doing so, Google made it official. It turns out that many successful projects currently happening in Google started off as a 20% project. When you visit the Google campus, you will see evidence that 20% is not a minus for Google and it’s a great example of creative minds.

After the tour we sat down and talked about how Derek got into Google and how he established his career. And we got to ask him lots of questions.

The company tour was the one of the best, not simply because of the fancy buildings or free food. We got to observe a new paradigm of a company for creative minds with critical thinking. Lots of thanks to faculty for arranging the tour.

Google4

Posted in Elective Class, Field Trips, Group Photos, Speakers, Spring '09 | Comments Off

Visiting Turbine West

Friday, April 17th, 2009 posted by siyang

turbine_logoOn April 14th, students from Entertainment Technology Center – Silicon Valley (ETC-SV), visited Turbine’s west coast studio. Everyone at ETC-SV was anticipating our trip to Turbine because Turbine was going to be the first MMORPG company visit. During the visit, we learned more about Turbine, discussed the challenges of developing on console and showcased our student projects.

Learning about Turbine
During his introduction, Jeff Lind, Director of Engineering at Turbine West, explained that by opening a Redwood City campus, Turbine would like to tap into the game developers’ talent pool in the west. As a company, Turbine created award winning MMORPGs such as Asheron’s Call (AC), Dungeon & Dragons Online (DDO) and Lord of the Rings Online (Lotro). In addition, Jeff briefly explained the pros and cons of a central technical and art team. While it may be controversial in game development, in my opinion, central tech and art teams could increase the efficiency of game development.

Console Challenges
In the second section of our visit, developers at Turbine West had an active discussion with the students from ETC-SV about the main technical differences of developing on console vs PC. Because students from ETC-SV were both working on the Xbox360 and the PC, we were able to hold a meaningful conversation with Turbine. Through the discussions, we agreed that the top challenge were:

1. Limited Memory on console: Memory on the PCs is cheap and relatively plentiful. Memory on consoles is extremely limited. For example, there are 512mb of memory on an Xbox360. In addition, there is no “Virtual Memory” to fall back on.

2. DVD-Drive / Limited hard-disk space: Everything from your game has to be loaded up from the DVD. Asset loading is significantly restricted by the DVD-drive speed.

Project Feedback

Turbine

Savoring SeeSaw

Turbine

Trying Trino

The final portion of our visit was a showcase of ETC-SV’s student projects. Turbine West offered both project teams valuable feedback. Jeff discussed with Project See-Saw the direction that we could take to discover even more valuable insights. For example, when creating balancing systems that artificially promote an unskilled player’s ability, Jeff talked about the importance of finding the “pinch” point of a skilled player. He explained that while it is important to help unskilled players survive in the game, it is also invaluable to note the point when skilled players start feeling that they are being punished for being skilled.

Conclusion
Overall, Turbine West was extremely cordial. The developers at Turbine West did a wonderful job providing insights on how an MMORPG company functions. Our visit there was very fruitful to both project teams. Thank you Turbine!

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Mystery Tour

Sunday, April 12th, 2009 posted by carl

A Silicon Valley style Magical Mystery Tour – two famous local tourist traps caked in oddness: the Winchester Mystery House, and the Mystery Spot. We rented a bus and took off on a Friday to explore these freaky places and see if we could make any sense of them.

Our first stop was the Winchester Mystery House, built by Sarah Winchester, wife of the creator of the Winchester rifle: the gun that won the West. She was rather superstitious and the house is filled with oddities she added during it’s unending construction. It was a long tour with a plethora of ’13s’, strange doors and staircases into the ceiling.

Winchester mystery house

In front of the Winchester Mystery House


Winchester mystery house

Mysterious, no. Strange, yes. I mean us.

Time to re-energize before the next mystery.

Field Trip 2009 Spring

Fine dining

And on to The Mystery Spot. Nestled deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, this is a wonderful place to visit where you evidently get to ignore physics and gravity. We didn’t float away or get swallowed into a magnetic vortex, but we were treated to some fun optical illusions. The effect is very fun, but spoilers can be found here.

Mystery Spot

Outside the Mystery Spot in the Santa Cruz mountains

Mystery Spot

Stephanus, clearly taller than Yu-Hsin

Mystery Spot

Wait - what?

Posted in Field Trips, Group Photos, Spring '09 | Comments Off

Ryan McIntyre, Venture Capitalist

Saturday, April 11th, 2009 posted by stephanus
ryan

Ryan McIntyre

Ryan McIntyre is a Venture Capitalist (VC) currently working as Managing Director of Foundry Group. His group mainly focuses on information technology and software companies. Their portfolio is comprised of many companies that you can find at http://www.foundrygroup.com/portfolio/. On April 9th, Ryan came and spoke to us about entrepreneurship and some of their portfolio companies.

During the talk, Ryan highlighted several companies he has invested in such as EmSense, Oblong, Smith&Tinker, and Zynga. One particularly interesting company is EmSense, which has a technology to measure brain activity and provide objective analysis of how a large audience responds emotionally and cognitively to some multimedia applications. Imagine how useful this piece of technology can be for entertainment companies! Before an entertainment product is launched, be it a game or movie, a company will typically do playtesting and/or screenings followed by some questions to gather feedback. The problem is that testers may not express their feelings truthfully, which in turns may affect decisions when polishing the product. Theoretically, with this technology, you can get an objective analysis to know whether the testers or viewers are engaged. This way you can really know if a person is enjoying the product. That is pretty neat.

He also shared how his entrepreneurship began. He explained to us how he and his friends from Stanford University got together and tried to solve a problem that hadn’t been solved before. In this case, they were trying to do a vector-space search engine. Basically, in this technique, documents are represented as a vector in a high-dimensional space. When a user is trying to find certain words, the engine will calculate the “distance” between the query and the documents in the database. The distance is used to tell whether the query matches a certain document closely. Subsequently, with a product in their hand, they plunged into the business world and Excite was born.

In the Q&A session, there was a good question regarding why VCs are hesitant to invest in game companies. The answer was simple: a game company requires a lot of money and it is a very risky business. However, Ryan commented that a VC is actually doing a very risky job no matter which companies/industries you invest in. He emphasized the importance of networking because most of the time companies get funded because the founders of the companies know someone in the venture capital firm. He gave Zynga as an example to support his argument.

Posted in Elective Class, Speakers, Spring '09 | Comments Off

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