In this ETC Insights Q&A, Melanie Lam reflects on Randy Pausch's educational philosophy, why storytelling belongs in computer science, and what three decades of Alice have taught us about helping people become creators.

Last spring at the Entertainment Technology Center, a team of graduate students spent their final semester asking: what happens when the phones in a room stop being separate windows and start working as one?

Big Picture Studio is a cooperative puzzle game played across as many as four networked phones. Instead of tapping through a single screen, players progress by physically connecting, rotating, and rearranging their devices, turning a tabletop of phones into a shared picture that shifts as they move.

Two middle school students wearing augmented reality glasses and holding “magic wands” are standing around a table. While it looks like they are just playing a futuristic game, they are learning how to code. Looking through their AR glasses, in It Takes 2 Alices, created by a team of Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology graduate students in Spring 2026, middle school students see a holographic animation and work together to solve puzzles, using the building blocks of coding.

This year’s edition of “ETC Year in Reflection” celebrates a milestone moment for the Entertainment Technology Center as they mark 25 years of learning, collaboration, and creative exploration.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center, a new video was released featuring reflections from the artists, designers, technologists, and storytellers who have shaped the program over the past quarter century.

Gather around, all who dare, for a true tale of how a team of graduate students used modern technology to connect people’s hearts to history and the real people who lived it. But first, the team had to…build a ghost. The GhAIst team at the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center (CMU ETC) brought Joseph Priestley’s scientific legacy and unexpected losses to life. They created and installed an AI-powered interactive, immersive, and educational experience for teenage visitors to engage with on-site at the Priestley-Forsyth Memorial Library.

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Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center has a room called the CAVERN, a 270-degree curved screen that puts virtual objects right in front of you. No headset required. This spring, a student team figured out how to make it work for two people at once.

After you walk under a trellis decorated with fragrant and multicolored blooms, a grandmother’s voice welcomes you to tend to the Remnants garden, located in the immersive CAVERN space at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. As you continue to water and prune, the flowers wilt, the colors fade, and the weeds grow. Remnants provides an immersive, emotional, and transformational experience for guests to understand and empathize with what it is like for a caregiver of a person living with dementia.

Once upon a time, in a middle-school classroom in Pittsburgh, students were studying art and engineering. Every day, in school, in activities, and at home, they learned new things, including watching movies and playing games, but could these skills be something they would pursue with higher education in the entertainment technology industry? Until one day, Dawn, an animatronic owl that could turn its head, move its beak, and flap its wings, visited the classroom.

How can virtual reality and haptic gloves work together to create profound emotional experiences? That is the simple but ambitious question that project Tacit aims to explore.

The most novel story you can tell is the one you choose to enter. To push the boundaries of mixed-reality storytelling and interactive gaming, the ImmerX team at Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) created five immersive worlds to explore in Travel-in-X.

Emerging from Carnegie Mellon University’s ETC, Kicks Lab is an experimental, educational video game meant to encourage middle school students’ curiosity in topics that blend science, arts, and engineering through shoe design.

A student team at ETC has been building something ambitious called Trinity. It’s a multiplayer co-op game that unites three players on three different platforms: VR, mobile, and PC. Designed for in-person play, Trinity has brought people together and surprisingly gathered a wider audience than anticipated.

There are games that can be played anywhere, anytime, but what about games created for a specific physical place and time? The Intergalactic Buttoneers modernized the iconic ETC Space Bridge, explored a series of location-based experience prototypes, and designed an immersive experience to bring the Space Bridge to life during the 2025 ETC Fall Festival.

Athena and Poseidon are trading witty banter as a curious visitor looks on. It’s not a scene from Mount Olympus, but a high-tech lab at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). There, a team of graduate students at CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) has used artificial intelligence (AI) to bring these mythological characters to life.

Something as simple as a pair of shoes can be life-changing in underserved communities. The World Shoe Fund has long known this, building its mission around the powerful link between footwear, health, and opportunity. Now, with help from the StepUp Project Team, that mission is entering the digital age through an engaging educational game that blends fun with lasting impact.

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to step inside a story — where every movement, sound, and light immerses you in pages of a book brought to life? Flow is an immersive experience that transports audiences into the heart of Chinese folklore through dance, light, and interactive technology.

Derek Ham has been the new director of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) in Hot Metal Labs, formerly 700 Technology Drive, since September of this year. Ham brings a strong background in interdisciplinary research, game-based learning, immersive storytelling, and algorithmic thinking.

Heather Kelley from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center gave a keynote address at SBGames 2024, Latin America’s premier academic conference on games and digital entertainment. Kelley's talk, titled "The Physical Future of Digital Games," delved into the evolving relationship between the physical and virtual worlds within the gaming industry.