CMU virtual world show lures headhunters to town
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Ian Bowie would seem to have no reason to be nervous this weekend.
The 100-hour weeks the 27-year-old level designer from Colorado put in this semester at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center had paid off.
Three of the virtual worlds he helped design -- out of the 14 chosen from 60 entries -- were included in two presentations Saturday of Building Virtual Worlds, shown before raucous, standing-room-only crowds at the Philip Chosky Theater on the CMU campus.
The virtual worlds ranged from the crowd-pleasing "The Great Illusionist", in which a real person on stage did magic tricks with a person on a video screen -- to the squeamish "Five Days", which had a person wearing a head-mounted interactive monitor saw off part of a trapped leg in a virtual world -- to disturbing "Teddy", one of the teams Mr. Bowie was on that featured a creepy teddy bear haunting a hospital patient.
The 13th annual show is the culmination of work first-year students like Mr. Bowie have conducted in the course of the same name, Building Virtual Worlds, where students create video-game-like worlds in five, intense, two-week projects, with a new four-person team each time.
It's the watershed course that each ETC graduate student takes the first semester and was made famous as the brainchild of the late CMU professor Randy Pausch.
But the show Saturday wasn't just any old end-of-semester show-and-tell.
For industry reps who attend the show by the hundreds, hoping to find the best students to later employ, the BVW, as they all refer to it, is something akin to the National Football League's pro day: they may already have an idea of what some of the students are capable of, but the BVW gives them a chance to see them perform up close and talk to them in person.
"If you see something at BVW that you loved or were touched by, you want to know who did that," said Mike Duke, Electronic Arts' lead game play engineer for the Sims 3 expansion pack. He's also an ETC alum, class of 2006.
What does that mean for normally confident students like Mr. Bowie looking to catch on with one of those companies?
"I'm not going to lie," he said before Saturday's show, "the pressure is definitely there.
"Because the studios who inspired all of us are going to be attending the show, and there's the potential that maybe we can inspire them, that makes things a little nerve-wracking," he said.
First Published December 12, 2010 12:00 am
