Summer 2007

Not Your Dad's Nintendo Article Contacts & Links

Georgia Tech takes an experimental approach to digital media. by T.J. Becker

An experimental approach is one of the hallmarks of Georgia Tech's digital media programs.

photo by Gary Meek Assistant professor Michael Nitsche is shown with a screen from Charbitat, an experimental game in which the 3-D world changes in response to players' actions. (300-dpi JPEG)

“We not only do paper designs, but when we get an idea, we develop it and get a prototype up and running,” says Michael Nitsche, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication and Culture (LCC). “Very few universities do that.”

A sampling of current projects includes:

Interactive TV – Students in Janet Murray’s Experimental TV Lab (www.etv.gatech.edu) have recently created a prototype for a game based on a broadband version of the Cartoon Network’s Ben 10 show, meant for broadband delivery through a game console like the Sony PS3. Players can select an episode and watch it with an active game controller targeting items in the video stream – such as a hat or a sword – and saving them to play in their own play space. This allows them to play a matching game, which intensifies their immersion in the show rather than distracting them from it.

Characters and procedural game spaces – Nitsche is developing an experimental video game called Charbitat (www.egl.gatech.edu/charbitat/) where the 3-D world changes based on the player’s actions in the game. The project, funded by Turner Broadcasting, focuses on the idea of procedural space. “You create the world as you play in it, which is unique,” Nitsche explains. “The game world is player dependent and constantly changing.”

Multiplayer gaming – Georgia Tech’s Emergent Game Group (egg.lcc.gatech.edu/), headed by Celia Pearce, focuses on “designing for social emergence” in massively multi-player online games (MMOGs). The group is developing Mermaids, a multi-player game set in an underwater mermaid world. The first prototype has been shown at the Game Developers Conference, the Indie MMOG Conference, SIGGRAPH and the Austin Game Developers Conference.

Moving beyond the joystick – Graduate students Brian Schrank and Jeremy Rogers are designing software that would react with a standard keyboard in new ways. “For example, if players bang the keyboard, they could get a different result as opposed to just typing,” says Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at LCC who is the project’s adviser.

Augmented reality – Researchers are working on an augmented-reality version of Façade, a video game in which players visit a quarreling couple’s apartment. In the augmented-reality version, players can physically walk through the couple’s apartment and carry on conversations with the computer-animated characters, which are superimposed on the real world via a see-through head-worn display.

“Our experiment compares whether walking around in the space is more engaging and enjoyable than sitting at a desktop,” says Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing (CoC). “Interestingly, we found that being immersed in the emotionally charged environment was too intense for some people and interfered with their ability to enjoy the experience as a game.”

In addition to MacIntyre, the project’s team includes Steven Dow and Manish Mehta, two CoC graduate students, and Michael Mateas, an assistant professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz who created the original Façade video game.

Video-game development is a multidisciplinary endeavor. “One of the great things about Georgia Tech is that interdisciplinary work is much easier here than other places,” says Murray. “Granted, collaboration is always easier in an institute of technology because the engineering model is one of making things together. Yet at Georgia Tech, there’s a particular climate of cooperation and mutuality of interests among the faculty in digital media which makes it much easier to collaborate.”