Round 2 - Final

Round 2 is over!

Round 2 - Interim

Another week, another BVW team, another platform, another game.

This time I was assigned to the Playmotion platform. The system reads shadow and IR information as input. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayMotion

This round's theme was indirect control. The objective is to make a game which can be played and understood by someone who is completely naive about gaming, the interface, and your world. Each team is only allowed one verbal suggestion to the guest playing. The rest has to be filled in by the game or experience itself.

This is just an interim version but take a look:

There's a lot here that implemented. Namely, we intend to have water rising as you play. When the water fills the house, you lose. Right now this is just indicated by numbers at the top of the screen that are probably too small to see in the video. We've also got to redesign the visuals because thigs are very muddled right now. Lots to do!

BVW

Woah. Its been a while. After a summer of adventuring and traveling I'm back at work in grad school. I'm attending the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Its crazy awesome but a ton of work. All new ETC students have to take a class called Building Virtual Worlds. The course stresses collaboration, adaptability, and working quickly. Project teams of 4 or 5 students work for two weeks developing a virtual world, game, or experience in Panda 3D.

In Round 0, modelers are asked to model and animate a lunchbox and a dragon. The dragon can only be 1500 polygons. Check out the final animation. I smoothed the dragon so it looked a bit nicer in the video.

In Round 1, student were put into teams with one 3D artist, one texture artist, one sound designer, and one programmer. Each team was asked to make a short virtual reality experience using either a Head Mounted Display or the Playmotion platform in which the guest helps another character who is afraid. My team was assigned to the Head Mounted display and decided to have the guest perform the role of a getaway driver. It didn't turn out as well as we'd imagined but so it goes. Take a look.