Happy Randy Pausch Day!
It only seems fitting that today, the day of our final “Building Virtual Worlds” presentation, is officially dedicated to celebrating the man who started this class twenty years ago. Our professors talk time and time again about how the work we do is a testament to Dr. Pausch’s legacy as a creator, professor and person, so it is rather humbling to keep that in mind as we do what we can to make him, the Entertainment Technology Center at large, and many others proud.
In addition to the class itself, one way we (as the ETC) attempt to honor Dr. Pausch is with a yearly showcase of all of the projects that students throughout the program have done called “ETC Festival”. One of the most prominent aspects of “Festival” is a collection of projects from everyone’s favorite graduate school pressure cooker, the “BVW Showcase”. As part of the “Showcase”, 15-20 “worlds” from the semester are chosen by students and a jury of judges to be refined, recreated, and displayed in their own rooms in the building as almost 1000 guests visit the “Festival” in December. As a “Festival world”, teams have to think about how to theme their classroom in order to enhance their work and make the guest’s experience as engaging and efficient as possible.
With that in mind, that is what the final round of “Building Virtual Worlds” was about. We were given three weeks (again, bonus points to the loyal readers that realized this comes a week later than usual) to conceptualize, design and build an engaging, interactive experience that could be scaled to room-size and entertain guests for an entire evening. To do this, we had to call upon lessons we learned throughout the semester - things like guest feedback, interest curves, story arcs, and more. Plainly, we had our work cut out for us… but we had a dream.
“Its important to have specific dreams. Dream Big. Dream without fear.”
Different members of our team came into this round with lofty dreams of a collaborative competitive “Festival” experience that immerses guests into a character role and asks them to act as that character in order to reach that goal. I echoed that sentiment and I also had a story concept that went unused from a previous round that we thought may fit the bill - or beak, as it were.
Chickens.
Why did the chicken cross the road? A timeless question with no great answer (sorry to 6-year-old comedians everywhere), this concept is something that most all guests have encountered at some point in their lives. In addition to that, chickens have very defined and well-known actions and likenesses that anyone can execute, e.g. flapping their wings, pecking at things, and clucking. After we all finally stopped laughing at the prospect of our professors flapping fake wings and clucking in front of our class, we realized that would be the fun factor of our game and those core interactions (and the sheer comedic value of watching others do them) would be the driving force of our experience. We also had a fun and unexpected answer to that aviary quandary: to find love.
“You can always change you plan, but only if you have one.”
We did Dr. Pausch proud with this statement. We set off to execute our “chicken-crossing” plan with a series of sensors attached to fake wings that could read in when a guest would flap to move the guest forward across a road in a chaotic, Frogger-style game. After we built the first iteration of the game, though, we realized that trying to turn was problematic.
As a team, we discussed how to turn for what seemed like days. Do we use grid-style movement? What about rotation? Should we flap to turn? Wait, we could use foot-pads? What if guests turn their heads?
*nervous cluck*
Questions swirled as we asked each other, classmates, family members and anyone we could find to get inside the mind of a chicken and ask them, “how would you turn?”. After lots of interviews and hours spent running around like chickens with our heads cut off, we finally took the new direction of changing platforms. Instead of using sensors to measure flaps and not much else, we decided to add in the XBox Kinect system to, hopefully, track guest body movements (rotation, very hopefully) in order to turn the bird.
[For reference, switching platforms mid-round is like naming a new starting quarterback on Friday afternoon when the game is on Sunday]
But as Dr. Pausch said, it is okay to change plans, especially because we had a fun and specific core interaction driving our vision. This is when I would like to say that switching to Kinect was the best decision we’ve ever made and it was super simple and easy to implement and everything was awesome. I would really like to say that, but I cannot.
As it is when you introduce a new quarterback to an offense, it takes a lot of time to get everyone and everything on the team up to speed and ready to play with their newest teammate. Things are often shaky at the beginning and there’s a sense of coach’s remorse wondering if you made the right decision. For us, Kinect’s inability to accurately map body rotation was proving to be a thorn in our side and what we thought could ultimately sink us if we could not figure it out. Our programmers worked day and night to figure it out, but time and their patience were both wearing thin. At this point, we made the controversial decision to stay with the Kinect, but forget about translation and solve turning with a left-to-right translation method that could be more easily tracked. While the gameplay got simpler, it meant a lot more work for everyone, especially our programmers.
“Are you a Tigger or an Eeyore?”
Luckily for us, we had lots of Tigger’s on our team, ready to face challenges head on with enthusiasm and positivity.
With that mindset, we pushed through the last week of iterations to create a fun and engaging experience that did exactly what we wanted it to. We got to watch our professors put on prop chicken wings, beaks, combs and feet and battle each other for the affection of the female chicken at the other end of the road. To hear our class belly-laugh and see our professors giggle the way they did and watch them walk away with smiles was enough justification for me that all of the heart-ache and stress of our final “BVW” round was worth its weight in gold.
“Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”
Throughout these three weeks, I was really worried we were not going to get the game (or experience) we wanted. Boy, was I wrong. I truly believe that the only reason we were able to get to the final product we did was because we were wrong so many times. Maybe that Thomas Edison guy was on to something when he talked how important it was to find ways to not build a lightbulb. We went through a lot of doors that taught us the wrong way to make a “chicken crossing a road to find love” experience, but we could only get to the right door if we went through some of the wrong ones first.
Maybe that’s the biggest takeaway from all of “Building Virtual Worlds”: try things. Spend your time doing things and making things to see them work or not work, not sitting around talking about if they will work. This class has pushed me to my creative limits to design and build things that work. More importantly, this class has pushed me to my limits of working with others, being wrong and being okay with being wrong.
That’s the kind of experience I think Dr. Pausch was really talking about above. The value of this class has been the experience of making wild and crazy things with others and being right and wrong along the way and learning from both outcomes. I may have shot you a death glare or said words I should not type on the internet if you asked for my opinions on “BVW” after some of my fifteen-hour day; however, if you asked me today, I would tell you that I have been immensely grateful for the opportunity to be a part of “BVW”.
So, thank you for that, Randy. Here’s to you.