Dave Culyba

Biography

Dave Culyba is an Associate Teaching Professor and Director of Curriculum at the Entertainment Technology Center. He teaches Building Virtual Worlds, one of the four immersion courses for new students. Through his courses, he focuses on game design, transformational design and experience design — particularly as they intersect with technology. As the Director of Curriculum his focus is on developing new ways for creative professionals to plan, create and problem solve as teams.

Beyond the ETC, Dave works as a game designer and developer at Ludoliminal, a board game publisher founded by his partner, Sabrina Culyba. He also really likes spreadsheets.

Dave Culyba joined the ETC in 2013.

Education

• Masters of Entertainment Technology, Carnegie Mellon University
• BS in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Related Links

• LinkedIn Profile
• Scholars@CMU

Courses & Projects

• Building Virtual Worlds
  Building Virtual Worlds is a project course where interdisciplinary teams build rapidly prototyped immersive interactive virtual worlds. It is one of the required courses students pursuing their Masters of Entertainment Technology take during their first semester.
• Monomon MR; Spring 2024
  MonoMon MR was a student pitch project focused on developing a multiplayer turn-based physical combat demo in mixed reality. The team was inspired by dueling card games like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and worked to transform their traditional tabletop gameplay into a captivating reality. The experience was built around a multiplayer shared space mixed reality experience that blended the physical and virtual realms and integrated physical rooms elements (chairs and tables) into meaningful play components.
• Chatbot AI  (taught with Brenda Harger); Spring 2023
  Team Chatbot AI developed a chatbot game about a witch trial that uses machine learning as a tool for narrative design. The team explored how AI generation can be used in creating a complete narrative experience. In the game, the player primarily interacts by having typed one-on-one conversations with a cast of characters powered by GPT-3. Through these interview-style conversations, the player will eventually uncover the mystery in a small New England town and help decide its fate.
• Inner Matter (taught with Heather Kelley); Spring 2022
  The Inner Matter project created a VR and sensor integrated meditation app to introduce a new audience to the efficacy of meditation through a research-based guided meditation in cooperation with Equa Health.
• CivRep (taught with John Dessler); Spring 2021
  CivRep prototyped a multiplayer transformational roleplaying game module as part of a larger civic learning game project, CivWiz, a civic learning game developed at the University of Pittsburgh, hosted by our client, Ron Idoko. CivRep’s goal was to empower players to understand and believe that they can indeed make an impact on their communities through civic engagement. The team created a playable prototype of the roleplaying module on AirConsole that was then be passed on to the CivWiz team to help guide the development of the roleplaying activity in the CivWiz application.
   

Achievements

• Found and Chair of the XR Brain Jam in collaboration with Games for Change, 2017-2023