Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) challenges students to work quickly, creatively and collaboratively. Part of the immersion semester, BVW gives small teams of students 1-3 weeks to create a virtual world, with new groups and goals for each round. It is a very intensive course, in which the students from very different backgounds have to learn new technologies and how to integrate each others work and ideas. At the end of each cycle the world is shown to the class and publicly critized. At the end of the semester there is a public festival with hundreds of spectators in which the students showcase a world.
Project Augur is an ETC project for Fall 2011 sponsored by Lockheed Martin. The team was formed on three programmers, two artists and a producer. The goal was to build artificial intelligence that can predict players behavior.
We did three prototypes aplaying the same process:
I worked programming the investoids game using Unity3D (C#).The objective of the game is to obtain as many coins as possible.It lasts 120 seconds. After 60 and 90 seconds the AI predicts the final outcome, based on the players actions and the previous data collection: on a base of 1075 collected games via mechanical turk, I used the Data Analysis Add-in from Microsoft Excel to calculate a linear regression on 16 attributes derived from the data capture. The final version had a standard error close to 0.73, which gave a prediction accuracy of +- 20 coins on average.
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Founded by DARPA, this project is part of the DARPA Engage initiative whose intent is to inspire young minds to pursue science and engineering as a career. ETC works together with the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute. HCII’s role is to meassure the ETC's games and dictaminate if children are trully learning. Our role is to make fun, engaging and appropiate games for our audience.
Both games have been implemented in Unity3D/C# and have builds for Android tables, Browser, PC and Mac.
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Sponsored by SmileGate project Wes-Turn aims to create a highly fun and engaging multiplayer experience using and iPad as a common screen and iPhones/iPodTouch as periferics. The game is designed to be played locally, the connection between the devices is via Bluetooth. The players interact with their handheld devices, the control of the games are touches on the screen and acceleration on the handheld device.
It is a wacky car racing game designed to encourage player verbal communication in a cooperative-competitive scenario, where the game requires from the players to pair up and syncronize their touches in order to gain speed advantage, but allows only a winner at the end. The aesthetic of the game is cartoony, seeking a blend between futuristic and western.
The game is being implement using Unity3D/ C#.
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