The building that houses Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center might be quieter over the summer while students are off pursuing internships, but that doesn’t mean the work stops. Summer gives ETC faculty and students concentrated time to dig deeper into creative and technical questions, test new approaches, and move ongoing projects forward.
This summer, that work spanned narrative-driven animation, humanoid robotics and human-computer interaction. Some projects were already years in the making. Others grew directly from student work at the ETC. Together, they show how summer creates space for ideas to develop beyond the boundaries of a semester.
Students are active collaborators in that process. Class of 2026 graduate Samantha Lai approached Assistant Teaching Professor Vivian Shen with a question that grew out of an ETC project; together, they developed research they presented at ACM SIGGRAPH in July. Assistant Teaching Professors Charles Johnson and Mo Mahler worked alongside second-year students Cayla Kennedy and Aidan Terry, putting their unique interdisciplinary skillsets to work.
This summer also marked the first year of the ETC Summer Research Fund, which provided support for Johnson and Mahler’s research and enabled them to engage ETC students in the work.
The projects look very different, but they share a common thread: time spent digging deeper, experimenting and making progress.
Moshe Mahler
Tell us about what you were working on this summer.
We were working on my next film. Like my last one [“The Art of Weightlessness”], it’s going to be another documentary. We’re in the pre-production phase of really trying to figure out what the film is. We’ve had a lot of audio and a lot of footage of what the story is about … but we were really trying to find the soul of the piece. We started by taking about two hours of footage and editing that down to a few minutes, trying to understand what the story is we want to tell; that’s one input into the visual process of creating storyboards, which demonstrate how we want to tell the story.
What were you able to accomplish over the past few months?
We completed a pre-production package for the film, which includes paring down the footage, constructing a cohesive story, and developing some of the visual design. Now that we know the story we want to tell, the next step is to make it — which will be a lengthy process in itself.
What impact did working with ETC students have?
I worked with [second-year ETC student] Aidan Terry, who is a tremendously talented animator in his own right. The resulting pre-production package is truly a collaboration between us: carefully weighing choices, iterating, and exploring the story together. We went through this process to allow the story to gradually reveal itself.
What are your next steps? We will continue working this fall, which will include making 3D assets, rigs, and eventually bringing the story to life through animation. That being said, production will be a multi-year process. My last film was nine minutes long and it took six years to make!
Charles Johnson
Tell us about what you were working on this summer.
We’re training robots to perform like humans through the lens of sports in particular. It’s a World Cup year, so we’re focusing on soccer. There’s already examples of robots doing athletic activities, but when you see images or videos of them performing you’ll see they tend to not be wearing shoes or clothing at all or wearing human versions. Alongside the Bot Intelligence Group and with the Costume Design program in the School of Drama, we set out to create both footwear and apparel specifically for humanoid robots with the goal of improving the way they perform from a theatrical standpoint, an athletic standpoint, and a technical standpoint — particularly when it comes to things like battery consumption and reducing programming load.
What were you able to accomplish over the past few months?
Through the design and development of both footwear and apparel for our Unitree G1 humanoid, we were able to establish a platform that we can use in the future to test their performance in sports and in other domains too.
What impact did working with ETC students have on your summer research project?
The impact was tremendous. The student that worked on the project, [second-year ETC student] Cayla Kennedy, was in many ways a model ETC student with advanced skills in multiple domains. The work she did required an understanding of the design, production and programming skills needed to create something in the sports entertainment space. And when there was something to learn, she took that on as well.
What are your next steps?
Now that we have a platform, the next steps will be to test it in performance environments and to have the robot perform different tasks in the footwear and apparel we created. We also want to put the humanoid in “classic” human-robot interactions to learn about the emotional impact the outfit has when people interact with the robot.
Samantha Lai & Vivian Shen
Tell us about what you were working on this summer.
Samantha: It started with a pitch project during my first project semester. Initially, I just wanted to make an interactive film in the CAVERN space where the audience could activate certain things by angling their body differently. After my team and I finished making the film [“Anamnesis”], I became really interested in researching how it actually worked on users. A lot of people came in and watched it and we got so many different reactions, and I just felt like there was something there. I wanted to know what the underlying epiphany was. But I had no research background whatsoever, so I approached Vivian [Shen] and asked her to help me design a user study where we would use EEG to measure people’s responses to the film in order to learn more about the role attention plays in narrative storytelling.
What were you able to accomplish over the past few months?
Samantha: We started preparing for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval during winter break and submitted our study in the spring. Once it was approved, we prepared to run the study over the summer. We created an interface with an on-screen widget to compare with the film’s original implicit interface, conducted the study with participants, and began analyzing the data and drafting our manuscript.
What was it like working with each other on the study?
Samantha: Vivian was the principal investigator for this research project, so she oversaw the user study design, the selection of surveys, and the research methods we used. She also gave very detailed feedback on the manuscript, including academic writing advice. Vivian was very hands on with me, and I learned a lot from her — especially in regards to how one conducts a user study and then writes a paper on it.
Vivian: Working with Samantha was great. She did a great job of independently gathering experts outside of our domain to coordinate and learn all that she needed for the project. Together, we scoped and ran a user study that tested the platform she and her prior project team built. We utilized human-computer interaction surveys and EEG data to draw conclusions.
You presented your work at ACM SIGGRAPH in July. What was that like?
Vivian: Samantha brought her project, ported into a portable VR version, and — along with two other ETCers — presented at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. Various researchers and industry practitioners showed a lot of interest in what we developed.
Samantha: It went very well! We received lots of interest about the premise of the project and the subsequent user study. A lot of visitors found the scheme of an implicitly controlled and adaptive narrative very interesting and asked whether we were going to take this project further.
What are your next steps?
Samantha: For now, we’re aiming to complete the paper and to prepare it for conference submissions.