Having a mixed feeling, we’re “back” to school. This semester will be a completely new experience for all of us as CMU offers a hybrid model of teaching and learning – we will be offered in-person and remote instruction. What does that mean to us who will be working on a client sponsored project? We don’t have an answer yet. We only knew that, from our first kickoff meeting (Zoom meeting), we’re very excited to work on this project. We’ll be working with Boston Dynamics to create a gaming/entertainment experience where BD’s Spot Robot is the main role. We shared our background and preferred roles with each member of the team and our instructors.
The team is made up of 6 students at the ETC. Shelley will be the producer of the team. Amelia will be the assistant producer and experience designer. Arnav will be the 3D artist/animator. Tyler will be the programmer. Yang will be the game designer/programmer. Yoli will be the game designer/concept artist. Not only we have a balanced skill set, but also have a background in hardware, so we made a strong team! We named ourselves “HotSpot”. It means that we’ll create an experience where Spot is the focus. It also shows we think Spot is cute and attractive.
We met with our client for the first time, Craig and Marco from Boston Dynamics. Although we didn’t meet in person, we had a very productive meeting. Before the meeting, we shared a meeting agenda with lots of questions to the client. Those questions got commented on immediately by the client! We felt surprised and very excited as they were also eager to work on the project. During the meeting, we asked a few questions about Spot but mainly learned their general expectations from us. They want us to use Spot to do something new and fun. Spot is very functional. For example, it could document construction progress. However, the client would like us to create an experience where Spot has entertainment purposes. They also hope that we could come up with one product rather than several prototypes at the end of the semester.
On the last day of the week, we finally made friends with Spots. We went to our project room and used the controller to control Spot. We tried different modes of Soot – sit, stand, walk, and stair modes. We were surprised by the amazing footwork of Spot when we made it climb the stairs! With a brief interaction with Spot, we had a general sense of how Spot moves. We felt great and started to think about what to do with our Spot friends.