Hi! We are a team of five graduate students from the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). This semester we are creating a game with a purpose (GWAP) as a Twitch extension that allows streamers to provide prompts, and viewers to record sounds and upload them based on the prompt. This allows everyone watching the stream to listen to the uploaded sounds. A database with all the recorded sounds will be published later to the public as a free resource.
This project is a continuation of the summer research by Audio Game Group from CMU led by Professor Jessica Hammer. We were thrilled on our first day to meet our team. We set up our project room and then had a meeting with our client. Jessica gave us an overview of the project design and also shared her expectations from us. After that, we had a team meeting and got to know each other’s skills and interests.
On the second day, we met with Bryan. He was part of the summer team that had worked on the prototypes for our project. This was insightful as we got detailed information on the work that was done during the summer. He explained the three prototypes that were developed and discussed in detail the final prototype that was chosen for production.
The next day we met with our faculty advisors: Heather Kelley and Moshe Mahler. They gave us an outline of what to expect from our client and how to prepare for the upcoming meeting with our subject experts from Bosch and Philips. We had a brainstorming session later that day to decide our team name and to align on our core hours.
We had a meeting, later that week, with the subject experts from Bosch and Philips to learn more about their expectations from our team. During this meeting, we learned that they wanted a scalable database to store at least raw audio data by the end of this semester. One other requirement was to develop a fun and engaging game which can be used in the future to collect audio data.
For the coming week, we will focus on researching and understanding our project. We want to research the technical part (Twitch extension, database, etc.) and similar products for inspiration. It was a productive first week and we are excited to see what happens next.
