Building Virtual Worlds: Fall 2015
BVW Piazza: ​
http://​
piazza.com/cmu/fall2015/bvw2015/home
- Announcements, general communication, help
BVW Support Email:​
[email protected]
​
- Official communication with instructors and TAs, submissions
Professors
Name
Jesse Schell
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Dave Culyba
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TAs
​
Room/Email
Office: 5317
[email protected]
​
Office: 2309
[email protected]
​
Name
TA Role
Stephanie Fawaz
Cheryl-Jean Leo
Eric Tsai
Brian Lin
Brandon Kang
Ariel Kuo
Aurora Zheng
Arim Yoon
Mahardiansyah Kartika
Zhetao Wang
Joseph Chiang
Larry Chang
Laura Weber
Head
Head
Pipeline
Pipeline
Pipeline/Shop
Art
Art
Art/Props
Programming
Programming
Programming/Web
Sound
Festival
Course Description
Due to the dynamic nature of both technology and our program, this is subject to change.
This is a project-based course that helps define the beginning of the two-year ETC Masters of
Entertainment Technology experience. In this course, interdisciplinary teams will build virtual
worlds and other interactive content. The course will emphasize the technical mechanics of how to
build virtual worlds, but will also cover the basics of environmental design, interactive game design,
non-linear storytelling, virtual reality, and interdisciplinary teamwork. Students will have great
latitude in the choice of worlds they create.
Our only content restrictions are the ones Randy Pausch originally defined:
1. No shooting games
2. No pornography
This is not because we object to them on moral or ethical grounds, but because those approaches
have been overdone, and this course is meant to encourage innovation. In that spirit, we may
sometimes give an award for the best failure on an assignment: for a group of students who pushed
the medium hard, and made us all think in novel ways, even if the experience they built wasn’t
successful by traditional standards.
Students will work with a variety of technologies, including: head-mounted displays, six degree of
freedom motion trackers, Phidgets, the Microsoft Kinect, Eye-tracking, PS Move controllers, various
systems for audience interaction, and possibly others yet to be determined.
Students in this Course Will Learn (In descending order of importance):
1. How to work in interdisciplinary teams towards a creative vision.
2. The mechanics of how to build interactive virtual worlds.
3. The basics of informal user testing and iterative redesign.
Note that while this course USES technology, it is not ABOUT technology.
Grades
This is a project-based course. Most projects will last roughly two weeks, done in groups picked by
the instructors and changing with each assignment. Under normal circumstances, all members of a
group will receive the same grade, although the instructors reserve the right to decouple grades if
necessary. Prompt class attendance is mandatory. Each student has two excused absences a
semester that are allowed.​
Each late arrival to class will drop your overall class grade by 1
​
percentage point. Each unexcused absence OR absences in excess of two will drop your overall class
grade by 2 percentage points.​
The TAs keep track of attendance at the beginning of each class, and
being ‘on time’ is defined as being in the room when attendance is taken. If you are late it is your
responsibility to see the TAs during class and let them know you are merely late and not absent. If
you do not talk to the TAs you will be marked ‘absent’. For the semester, grades will be based:
● 45% on non-final projects (team groups assigned by instructor)
● 20% on the final Festival project (students may be allowed to form their own groups with
instructor permission)
● 35% on instructor evaluation, based primarily on peer evaluations. ​
Please take special note of
the weight for this part of the class.
On a typical project, 1/3rd of the grade will be given at the half-way progress point (typically after
one week), and the other 2/3rd is given at the final showing of the work, typically after another
week from the half-way point. All that said, your grades are ultimately irrelevant. All that is relevant
is creating great things.
Piazza and Email
Most communication for and about this class will take place on Piazza. Students are encouraged to
post questions, conduct discussions and seek input from their peers, TAs and instructors on Piazza.
Additionally, email may be used at times for students to submit assignments or for important
reminders. Students are required to check Piazza and email at least once every 24 hours, weekends
included.
Social Responsibility: Peer Evaluations and the Use of Your Work
One theme of this course is that when an individual focuses on the group/society they live/work in,
rather than on himself or herself, everybody can benefit. There are two concrete examples of this in
BVW: First, you will be asked to evaluate your peers, both to assist in the course grading, and to
provide feedback to them as human beings. We will cover the details of this in class; we realize it is
uncomfortable, and you may not like doing it, but you must accept this responsibility to enjoy the
benefits of being in the class. Second, your work will be on display in public (often through venues
such as YouTube, Vimeo, and your classmates’ portfolios. Under Carnegie Mellon rules, you OWN
any IP you create, which, in the case of this class, are the artifacts/worlds your teams build (not the
ideas behind those artifacts – an important distinction). Since each one of you will ultimately
benefit by public demonstration of these artifacts, we expect that all of you will, as good
teammates, allow the public dissemination of these artifacts. If any of you have any issues with this
policy, please see Dave or Jesse in private.
How Class Time is Spent
This is a class where you ​
learn by doing​
, and as a result, lectures will be brief and to the point. Some
students may not be used to a class where lectures are but a small % of class time. Please be aware
this is BY DESIGN. This class, in the way it progresses through the semester, has oft-times more in
common with an art studio class in CFA than it does a software engineering course. Again, this is BY
DESIGN. Students taking this course should anticipate it being extremely time consuming, but also a
terrific amount of fun! Most of the class time will be used to demonstrate and critique the worlds
you have created. The critiques are where the majority of learning takes place. For students not
from the art world, this can be very disconcerting. Again, BY DESIGN.
Where and How You Should Work in This Class
This course has traditionally had students from art, architecture, design, drama, computer science,
electrical and computer engineering, human-computer interaction, music, social sciences, and a
few other majors. These disciplines all have different standards for how they communicate, how
they train their students, and how they evaluate the quality of work. It is extremely important that
students in this course be tolerant of the different cultures that are represented. ​
Based on
experiences in the real world with these kinds of interdisciplinary teams, one of our goals is
"getting through the semester without a fist fight occurring in a group."​
To help meet that goal,
there are a few basic standards that all reasonable cultures have in common:
● Be honest.
● Treat everyone with respect
● Listen when it’s someone else’s turn to talk, and actively solicit input from each team
member.
● Show up, ​
on time​
, for any meetings you schedule.
Finally, we expect you to do all work for this course in the ETC building. If you work by yourself, you
will be missing the whole point of the course and you will often put your team’s success at risk.
Roles within Building Virtual Worlds
The goal of Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) is to take students with varying talents, backgrounds, and
perspectives and put them together to do what they couldn't do alone. The BVW class is divided
into an introductory round (Round 0), and team-based Rounds 1-5. At the beginning of every new
round you will be placed in a different team of five students, each with one of the following
assigned roles:
● Programmer (2)
● Artist (2)
● Sound Designer (1)
Every student will be assigned a primary role. We assign roles to guarantee that every team has
every skill needed to complete a successful world. You are responsible for filling the role you are
assigned in a team, but you are NOT constrained to working within your assigned role only. There
will be a few cases where, due to "talent shortages", some students will need to make use of their
secondary skills on teams. We will make every effort to make sure no one gets stuck in roles they
are not well-suited for, but students should expect to have to make occasional sacrifices, and step
up to unexpected challenges. Although we hope to allow students the opportunity to perform each
role they qualified for, there is no guarantee that this will be the case. The TAs and faculty have
final decision-making powers over teams and roles.