Amalgamedia
Amalgamedia, together with the band Anti-Flag, is creating a one of a kind transmedia experience. Transmedia is the next wave of entertainment. It combines multiple mediums of current digital technology to tell an overall story, creating an engaging experience unlike any other.

Amalgamedia will create a web based interactive music video for Anti- Flag using Facebook, HTML5 and film. The experience will take you on a journey to see how your information posted on Facebook is really used. You will then get the chance to save your information and the end of the experience depends on how well you perform. Can you rescue your private information from the wrong hands?
Beyond Interactions
During spring semester of 2013, our team Beyond Interactions is investigating how games can be used for social change. This semester we are tasked with the responsibility to deliver an experience for our clients, Games for Change based in New York, to be presented at the 10th Games for Change festival held in June. The team needs to create an experience that would potentially involve more than a hundred people and keep them engaged with an emphasis on a social change.

This project comes with its own set of mammoth challenges, one being keeping such a large audience engaged in the experience. We also need to consider a large variety of parameters like the venue for the festival, the expected demographic and a social change that would involve a large section of the audience while designing this game. Various team members also have the option of actually running the game live at the festival. We will be working with Emily Treat from Games for Change as our primary contact from client's end.
Bravura
“Everyone can create music.”

Bravura is making this statement a reality. We are a team of programmers, artists, designers, musicians, and music lovers looking to share our passion for music with the world. To do this, we are working with our client and faculty advisor, Jiyoung Lee, to create a combined exploratory playground and musical tool on the iPad for people ages eight and up. Guests will be working within and manipulating musical structures in a unique environment previously unseen in the world of interactive musical games and software.

Our goal is not only to make people feel confident in their ability to make music, but also to plant seeds of interest for a lifelong musical journey.
CardioActive
The Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) is a future forward US Army medical R&D center. TATRC, a world leader in medical simulation, neuro- prosthetics and telemedicine, desires to create exercise games that people will actually use and want to keep using.

This semester, CardioActive is the team that will help achieve this goal for TATRC, along with the help of their faculty adviser, Mike Christel, and Client Representative, Thomas B. Talbot, MD, MS. CardioActive is spending the semester both researching and developing "exer-games" with the goal of creating a game that is unique, fun, and rigorous.
Dark Clutches
Dark Clutches is a student pitch project developing the next evolution of tablet gaming. Our game combines aspects of classic 2D platformers and intuitive gesture controls to create highly cooperative multiplayer gameplay. A group of two or three players will band together to protect a dragon egg from ruin and reclamation.

Our goal is to bridge the gap between console and mobile games. We are doing this by blending local multiplayer and dedicated play sessions with the intuitive interfaces of touch devices. While our primary platform is the iPad, we are taking advantage of an increasingly interconnected world and providing cross platform play between an iPad and a home computer.

Our final deliverable will be a short playable demo to showcase our experimental gameplay.
dotdotdot
dotdotdot is developing an interactive experience designed to encourage kids to write stories.

Children and their families will be able to create their own stories in a fun, playful environment while learning to organize their thoughts and tell their stories in a linear fashion. By allowing children to play within a classical story structure and create their own personalized story, we hope to create a sense of accomplishment and an appreciation for the written word.

The installation will be housed in the San Antonio Children’s Museums new Imagination Studio (Opening 2015) as well as several branches of the San Antonio Public Library.
flux
Every space has a story to tell.

Our project is exploring this notion by prototyping and fabricating a series of interactive art installations. Although the structure of a space may remain unchanged, the experiences that take place in it are constantly in flux. Every space has a history of which we are too often completely unaware, and our project seeks to tell those stories, connect people across time, and help them realize themselves as part of a larger social context.

The first half of the semester will consist of designing and prototyping several ambient and tactile interactive experiences. The second half of the semester will be spent expanding a selection of the prototypes, fabricating them into full-scale installations, and polishing them for final installation in the Entertainment Technology Center building.

Our team brings together architecture, electrical engineering, industrial design, and psychology to create physical experiences that explore new areas of entertainment technology.
GASx3
GASx3 stands for Gas! Gas! Gas! which is the way soldiers spread out immediate awareness about chemical hazards.

GASx3 is working with TATRC to create a real time strategy game that simulates the field training course for chemical medics. We want the soldiers to gain indirect experience and perform better in the real battlefield to save many lives.
Project Heidegger
In collaboration with EA's Office of the Chief Creative Office, or OCCO, the goal of Project Heidegger is to develop a system that identifies player types with the purpose of making recommendations to gamers accurately, unobtrusively, and with a high degree of personal specificity. We're most interested in connecting previously unlinked games, franchises, and genres, and are focusing on the co-op experience. The games serving as the basis of our research and experimentation are Dead Space 3 and Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel.

Our team will form a hypothesis about what kinds of players are attracted to co-op gameplay, work with a level designer from Visceral Games to build a custom Dead Space level to test our hypothesis and gather player metrics, conduct and analyze comparative playtests of our Dead Space level and a complementary Army of Two level, and construct a functioning Origin module which will visualize for users the data we've collected in the form of unique recommendations.

We believe that transparency is the element presently absent from recommendation systems, and Project Heidegger hopes to build a system that will not only share telemetry data with gamers and direct them toward experiences tailored to their play-styles, but also offer to them why we're making particular recommendations.

We hope to better inform players of their individual play-tastes and to advocate gaming as one collective adventure rather than a series of disparate and fragmented adventure- slivers
HEXAD
Have you ever felt uncomfortable in a culturally unfamiliar situation? We are here to help you.

We are HEXAD, a project team for Spring 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). In cooperation with Sarah J. Mahler from Florida International University, we are creating a virtual experience in which people enter feeling discomfort about a situation they must face, and exit feeling less discomfort or, ideally, fully comfortable.
Impact!
Impact! is a project working towards inspiring young minds to pursue science and engineering as a career. Initiated by DARPA, this is a multi-year project working in conjunction with many different institutions and organizations, such as the Sesame Workshop and Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute. The end- product will be a series of multi- platform games for Pre-K-3rd graders that inspires interest and teaches basic concepts in the field of science.

This semester our team is working on four existing projects simultaneously: “Teeter Totter Go!”, “Rumble Blocks”, “Beanstalk” and “Sleepy Busy Party”. Our goal is to improve them all to the final release state. Specifically, one of our main goals is to transform “Teeter Totter Go!” into a game worthy of being hosted on PBSKids.org. We will be making our game fit into The Electric Company’s game, “Prankster Planet”, and make it more exciting for kids playing the game. Our goal is that as they play, the children will be able to learn the balance formula based on Robert Siegler’s paper, perform socio-emotional tasks and, what is equally important, have a lot of fun!
Lazer Mouse
The Lazer Mouse team is working with MAKESHOP at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh to introduce the laser cutter to kids and families. In MAKESHOP, children are given real materials and tools to make physical their creative ideas. A team of skilled makers, artists and educators encourage and help visitors turn their vision into tangible objects. This exploratory environment is filled with sewing machines, electronic circuit blocks, stop motion tools, woodworking tools, and more. It all starts with a simple question, “What do you want to make today?”

This semester, we will add a laser cutter to the MAKESHOP toolbox. We'll be focusing on designing and implementing an interface that allows kids to design for that laser cutter. Finally, we will be documenting our experimentation and end-product, so that the teaching artists at the museum can help kids create what is in their imaginations.
Morality Play
Morality Play is the joint transmedia venture being undertaken by both a team at the Entertainment Technology Center and students in Carnegie Mellon University’s Philosophy Department. Interweaving a plethora of media, such as digital video, social media websites, and games, the project will produce a engaging experience designed to show people the facts about economic inequality in America. “What caused it?”, “What is fair?”, and “What can be done?” are all questions that will be touched upon from as many viewpoints as possible.
neuraltone
neuraltone is working with Dr. Lori Holt of the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint venture of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Holt is conducting research about how the brain categorizes complex audio patterns and how that process relates to perceiving linguistic sound categories. They have found that a simple video game, developed in-house, can be used to train players to better recognize different sound categories far more effectively than traditional explicit feedback-based training.

This semester we are creating a new game with which to conduct this training research. Our goals are to make a game that is highly engaging and fun, while retaining the effect of implicit sound categorization learning that occurred in the original game. It will also be highly customizable, allowing the researchers greater control over such elements as difficulty, timings, and art. Additionally, our game will output extensive, in-depth data about the play session for each research subject that plays it.
Osiris
Osiris is working with the CMU Hacking Team (PPP or Plaid Parliament of Pwning) and their faculty adviser, Prof. David Brumley to design a nation-wide high school competition (picoCTF) to encourage computer security and computer science education.

The goal of this project is to help design, implement, and run a compelling and authentic computer security game that will teach beginners the basics and challenge the experts as well.
Stardust
Stardust is working with Give Kids The World, a nonprofit theme park in Central Florida, where children with life-threatening illnesses and their families enjoy an all paid vacation.

The team is taking existing characters from the park to create a 3D animated short to be displayed at the park.
The Voyage
The Voyage is a collaborative project between Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center and the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History in Pittsburgh. It seeks to explore new ways for museum-goers to create connections between exhibits through mobile devices. The process of uncovering these connections will allow for an interactive journey to take place throughout the facility. The platform will share these discoveries amongst other guests, creating an experience that is dynamic and is able to present the museum in a new light each time one visits. By defying the notion of a museum as a static establishment and redefining it as a dynamic experience, it is our hope that we can infuse a new layer of interdisciplinary, experiential learning into the museums.

CONTENT

What is a Project?

Students in the ETC-Global take courses ranging from computer programming to designing virtual worlds to improvisational acting, but the emphasis is on project courses. Each project course brings together interdisciplinary student teams that must produce working artifacts; in the tradition of Carnegie Mellon, this emphasis is on making real things that work. A key aspect of the program is to ensure that students have an opportunity to work with a large, diverse set of collaborators with different skills and sensibilities. A typical project covers an entire semester and is built around four or five students, a faculty supervisor and possibly a client representative.