The Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center: Putting Artists and Engineers Together to Make Interactive Content
Speaker
Randy Pausch
Co-Director, Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Description
New forms of entertainment, training, and education are now possible due to advances in digital technology. Carnegie Mellon has created the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) [etc.cmu.edu], a joint initiative between the School of Computer Science and the College of Fine Arts. (I co-direct this center with Don Marinelli, Professor of Drama and Arts Management). The ETC grants a two-year “Masters of Entertainment Technology” degree. We have eight-five students in our Masters program; half are artists and half are technologists. Students from the ETC have been hired by companies such as Electronic Arts, Rockstar Studios, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Microsoft, PIXAR, Walt Disney Imagineering, etc. Electronic Arts alone hired almost 40% of our class last year, and we have a standing agreement for a minimum of ten internships each summer. In addition to video games and other traditional entertainment forms, our students go on to create museum installations and other novel interactive experiences.
A fundamental intellectual challenge of the ETC is finding ways to share control between content authors and the audiences/users/players/guests of that content. A fundamental social challenge of the ETC is finding ways to get artists and technologists to work together. ETC students are continuously involved in project courses, where small teams of students from different backgrounds work closely under faculty guidance to create a technology-enhanced entertainment experience. A typical project might be to create an interactive theatrical piece, a robot who can sustain conversation, or a small scale educational video game.
This talk will describe what we believe is important in educating students for the entertainment industry, and how we do it. We will describe typical ETC student projects, including work in the “Building Virtual Worlds” course, where student teams build interactive, helmet-based virtual reality worlds on a two-week production schedule. We will also describe the lessons we have learned in how to most effectively put artists and technologists together into small teams that succeed.
Speaker's Bio
Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he is the co-director of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done Sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) and Electronic Arts (EA), and has consulted with Disney on user interfaces for interactive theme park attractions and with Google on user interface design and testing. Dr. Pausch will be a keynote speaker at SIGCHI 2005, is the director of the Alice software project (www.alice.org), and has been in zero-gravity.
Speaker's Website
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/