undesigned

JCDL 2008 trip continued: I’ve watched Alice with interest for a number of years and my children and I have played with it. Naturally, Randy’s last lecture renewed my interest. Wednesday morning I visited Drew at the Entertainment Technology Center that Randy co-founded. Drew was very kind to give me a tour of the place, including robot hall of fame and design rooms, while describing the amazing program and projects they do there.

The Masters in Entertainment Technology (MET) program brings together people from multiple disciplines to work together on intensive entertainment technology projects. He said that this is the head fake; the MET program is designed to help people learn to communicate together and work as a team. It only made me wish I could be back in school doing their program! Now if I can just convince Julianne

Drew explained that they Randy likes research and had pretty much moved Alice and his group back to the CMU campus for some time even before the last lecture. While Alice is a good tool for introducing programming to novices, it is not the tool of choice for developing production quality 3D games. The ETC now uses Panda3D heavily with Jesse Schell one of the primary contributors on staff. Panda3D is the open-source, python programmable, game engine used by Disney to develop games such as Toontown and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Very cool! I could have kicked myself when standing outside waiting for the bus I realized that I failed to take out my camera during my tour of the ETC.

Posted on July 9th, 2008 by joel
Filed under: conferences