Information + Communications Technology
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Entertainment Technology Center
Contact: Byron Spice, +1 412.268.9068, bspice@cs.cmu.edu, www.etc.cmu.edu
Eric Sloss, +1 412.268.5765, ecs@andrew.cmu.edu, www.etc.cmu.edu
Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center
Synopsis
The moment you step off the elevator, you're in another world. Dim lights, touch-screen consoles and robots welcome you to Carnegie Mellon University's groundbreaking Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), where graduate students collaborate to build life-size robots, interactive video games and virtual worlds intended to entertain, inform and inspire. At the ETC, founded by former Drama Professor Don Marinelli and the late Computer Science Professor Randy Pausch, students use their left and right brain, combining art and technology, to earn the only master's degree in entertainment technology (MET) offered in the world.
Overview
Students in the ETC, under the auspices of Carnegie Mellon's College of Fine Arts and its School of Computer Science, take courses ranging from computer programming to designing virtual worlds to improvisational acting, but the emphasis is on project courses. Students devote most of their energy - and do most of their learning - as members of interdisciplinary teams completing projects in lieu of taking traditional classes. And students in each project course must create a working product.
A key aspect of the program is to ensure that students have an opportunity to work with a large, diverse set of collaborators with different skills and sensibilities. A typical project covers an entire semester and is built around four or five students, a faculty supervisor and a client representative. Current projects include: Chautauqua Interactive, a project focused on exploring new ways to integrate technology into the theatrical performing arts in order to create a more interactive experience for the audience; TeachCraft, a project to help close the technological gap between students and teachers, by bringing new ways to use modern technology to support the classroom and the teaching process; Get in Line 2.0, an effort that hopes to make waiting in line something worth waiting for; and WMS Electric Storm, an effort that aims to define the future of casino gaming.
The most famous course at the ETC is its "Building Virtual Worlds." In this abbreviated two-week course, students build virtual worlds and then put them on display in a campus forum that annually entertains more than 500 students, faculty and staff from across the university.
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