Trino is the result of two quarters worth of work by one of my student teams at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). It’s a wonderfully fun game for the XBOX, and you can download it from XBOX Community Games.

Everyone on the team is graduating this Sunday, and we’re going to miss them a lot. All of them were out here in Silicon Valley for two semesters, some of them for three, so we all got to know each other really well. That cliche about ‘learning more from your students than they learn from you’ comes from having students like these.

Please check out the game!

Here’s the trailer:

I should have colored the glasses yellow.

Did anyone NOT shoot pictures of people wearing 3D glasses today?

This shot was taken at a Superbowl party with a bunch of my west coast CMU friends – all Steelers fans.

First view of Korea

I just returned from the ICON2008 International Content Creator’s Conference in Busan, Korea, which I was invited to attend as a keynote speaker. I was busy enough that I didn’t post while on the trip, but I’m going to break the trip down into a few different posts here.

This was my first visit to this beautiful country, and I wish I had been able to stay longer than only 2 1/2 days.

The Bexco Convention Center

Most of my visit was spent at the conference – in addition to giving my talk, there were other interesting talks to attend, prep meetings, press interviews, a few meet-and-greet events, receptions and time touring the exhibition.

The ETC also had a recruiting booth on the exhibit floor, so I had friends in town.

From left to right: Jiyeong coordinates the ETC’s Asian activities; John develops and manages the ETC’s Asian relationships; and Rebecca is Director of Admissions. Missing from this shot is Nayoung, the ETC student who is responsible for my invitation to speak at the conference. Thanks you guys, what a blast hanging out with you!

Here’s a link to all my pictures from the trip on flickr.

Summer Vacation is officially over. Today was our first day of the fall semester for our remote outpost of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, or ETC-SV (for Silicon Valley). This group shot is of the students, plus Jiyoung and me (faculty) and Michelle (staff) in front of the EA logo in Redwood Shores. Like last semester, EA is providing us with space – which we dearly love.

Linhan, Youngwook and Siyang were out here last semester, too, so there’s only five new names and faces to get to know.

One of this term’s projects is based out of Australia, so half the team is heading down under on Friday for a week. The rest of us are meeting with a local company on Friday to get acquainted with some very cool display technology. You can follow along on the ETC-SV blog that we just set up.

I spent Monday at DreamWorks’ Glendale campus as a part of their Educators’ Symposium. It was fun to be back on campus – this time as an invited teacher, which made it rather unique. Alex McDowell gave an in depth talk about design for live action and animated features in the digital age, including examples from his work on Minority Report, The Terminal, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Bee Movie. He also gave us a sneak peak at the special trailer of Watchmen that was only screened at Comic-Con. Though I’m very familiar with all the ways that digital design is being used in production, Alex has a unique and informative view on how it fits into the big picture, including an interesting workflow chart (that makes more sense when he walks you through it).

They also screened a sequence from Madagascar II and a 3D sequence from Monsters Vs. Aliens. Since these aren’t due out for a bit, I won’t say anything other than they look fantastic and we laughed out loud all the way through both of them. I can’t wait for the final films!

We were also treated to a composite reel of student work from 24 schools that submitted pieces. It’s exciting to see the level of talent that is just coming of age now, and the breadth and variety of work that they’re doing.

Thanks DWA for a great day!