AVATAR MINOR IN DIGITAL MEDIA (DMTEC)
The AVATAR Minor in Digital Media (DMTEC) is a complementary, interdisciplinary minor designed for students with an interest in digital media as it applies to their wide range of degrees and disciplines while maintaining a minimum core of experience across the minors. A 2.0 GPA in the minor field is required.
Students in an engineering or science major should contact the College of Engineering for more information on the technology track for the AVATAR Digital Media minor (DMTEC). Students not in an engineering or science major should contact the College of Art + Design for more information on the arts track for the AVATAR minor (DMART).
REQUIRED COURSES (6 HRS):
1. Choose 3 hrs: ART 1001, ART 1011, ARTH 2470, MUS 1751, MUS 1799, or ENGL 2009
2. Choose 3 hrs: CSC 1253, CSC 1350, or IE 2060
ELECTIVE COURES (12 HRS):
1. Choose 9 hrs from Science/Engineering core courses
2. Choose 3 hrs from Arts core courses
REQUIRED CAPSTONE COURSE (3 HRS):
• EE 4859 (3 hrs credit - Permission of Department Required)
To declare the Digital Media minor, students will need to notify the adviser in their major area of study to let him or her know that they wish to declare the digital media minor. For more information on the minor or AVATAR, please contact Lea Anne Couvillion at leaanne@cct.lsu.edu.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Digital Media Minor - ART Core (DMART)
AVATAR MINOR IN DIGITAL MEDIA (DMART)
The AVATAR Minor in Digital Media (DMART) is a complementary, interdisciplinary minor designed for students with an interest in digital media as it applies to their wide range of degrees and disciplines while maintaining a minimum core of experience across the minors. A 2.0 GPA in the minor field is required.
Students in an engineering or science major should contact the College of Engineering for more information on the technology track for the AVATAR Digital Media minor (DMTEC). Students not in an engineering or science major should contact the College of Art + Design for more information on the arts track for the AVATAR minor (DMART).
REQUIRED COURSES (6 HRS):
1. Choose 3 hrs: ART 1001, ART 1011, ARTH 2470, MUS 1751, MUS 1799, or ENGL 2009
2. Choose 3 hrs: CSC 1253, CSC 1350, or IE 2060
ELECTIVE COURES (12 HRS):
1. Choose 9 hrs from Arts core courses
2. Choose 3 hrs from Science/Engineering core courses
REQUIRED CAPSTONE COURSE (3 HRS):
• ART 4059 (3 hrs credit - Permission of Department Required)
To declare the Digital Media minor, students will need to notify the adviser in their major area of study to let him or her know that they wish to declare the digital media minor. For more information on the minor or AVATAR, please contact Lea Anne Couvillion at leaanne@cct.lsu.edu.
The AVATAR Minor in Digital Media (DMART) is a complementary, interdisciplinary minor designed for students with an interest in digital media as it applies to their wide range of degrees and disciplines while maintaining a minimum core of experience across the minors. A 2.0 GPA in the minor field is required.
Students in an engineering or science major should contact the College of Engineering for more information on the technology track for the AVATAR Digital Media minor (DMTEC). Students not in an engineering or science major should contact the College of Art + Design for more information on the arts track for the AVATAR minor (DMART).
REQUIRED COURSES (6 HRS):
1. Choose 3 hrs: ART 1001, ART 1011, ARTH 2470, MUS 1751, MUS 1799, or ENGL 2009
2. Choose 3 hrs: CSC 1253, CSC 1350, or IE 2060
ELECTIVE COURES (12 HRS):
1. Choose 9 hrs from Arts core courses
2. Choose 3 hrs from Science/Engineering core courses
REQUIRED CAPSTONE COURSE (3 HRS):
• ART 4059 (3 hrs credit - Permission of Department Required)
To declare the Digital Media minor, students will need to notify the adviser in their major area of study to let him or her know that they wish to declare the digital media minor. For more information on the minor or AVATAR, please contact Lea Anne Couvillion at leaanne@cct.lsu.edu.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Game On: LSU Students Apply Cutting-Edge Creativity, Interactive Techniques to Develop Original Video Games
When most people play a video game, they just focus on winning, unaware of the multiple science, computer programming, technology and art elements that went into its makeup.
These critical elements are the focus of a course LSU has offered since 2007, in which students work in teams to form “companies” and develop an original video game throughout the course of a semester.
The course is listed in the university’s registration materials as both an art and a computer science course, and the material is interdisciplinary, encouraging students from different academic backgrounds to work together in creating a game, each contributing their strengths to the product. Computer science students work on many of the programming elements, while art students work on storyline and character creation.
LSU offers the video game design class in collaboration with University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC. In the class, which students attend via high-definition video streaming broadcast from Chicago to Baton Rouge, participants learn core concepts to develop and design video games, from storyline to character development to coding.
Jason Leigh, a computer science professor at UIC and director of the university’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, teaches the course from UIC in collaboration with LSU’s Robert Kooima, adjunct faculty in the LSU Department of Computer Science and a post-doctoral researcher with the Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, or AVATAR, Initiative in digital media. Kooima worked with Leigh at the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory before coming to LSU in 2008.
The video game design course will be part of the curriculum for the AVATAR minor in digital media, which will begin in the Fall 2010 semester, allowing students to take courses in different departments to prepare for careers in digital art, animation, electronic composition, video game design and related fields.
“The video game design class has been popular since we first offered it, and its success at LSU was one of many reasons we worked to create the digital media minor,” said Stephen David Beck, Derryl and Helen Haymon Professor of Music and AVATAR lead. “Many college students want to learn the necessary skills to work in these emerging industries, and we hope many of the students who have participated in the video game class will sign up to take other, related courses toward the digital media minor.”
This year, the video game design course had record participation, with 53 students between the two universities. At LSU, there were nine computer science students, 11 art students and one education student participating. The students divided into 12 teams to form companies and, with the exception of one all-UIC group, the companies had an equal balance of LSU and UIC members, who worked together all semester to create an original video game.
Beginning with the 2009 course, Leigh and Kooima began emphasizing games with multi-player, multi-touch capabilities. To give the class a place to experiment with multi-touch gaming, Kooima began building a 52-inch TacTile LCD touch table with high-definition video. The students were able to use this table in rough form to play and display their video games in 2009, but it was completed and available for the 2010 students.
“We always try to emphasize new trends and possibilities in the gaming industry with this course, and a current one is allowing people to touch and interact directly with the game,” Kooima said. “This table gives the students a platform to develop these types of popular games. In the coming semesters, we hope to try other new gaming techniques, such as super-high resolution gaming on tile displays, which occurs on multiple screens simultaneously. We definitely want to keep doing things that are unique.”
As in previous semesters, students spent the final class period of the semester, on Friday, April 30, playing and presenting the video games their “companies” created.
Kooima and a judging panel comprised of representatives from the Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium, Louisiana Tech Park and the Electronic Arts Video Game Test Center in Baton Rouge evaluated the games, which constituted a large component of each student’s final grade. The students had a special guest judge, Tom DeFanti, Ph.D., an internationally recognized pioneer in visualization and virtual reality technologies. DeFanti, who was Leigh’s dissertation adviser and helped establish the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at UIC, was at LSU to speak as part of the AVATAR Lecture Series. He participated in the video game class competition during his visit.
The judges awarded prizes for Best Audio Design; Best Visual Design; Best Technical Achievement, which looked at the computer science elements included in the game; Best Interaction Design, which evaluated how well players could touch and experience the game; Best Bookends, which focused on the titles, sequences and conclusion, elements that Kooima said are important but often overlooked in gaming; and Best Game Play (overall).
With the exception of Best Technical Achievement, which the all-UIC team won, teams with LSU members won in all the other categories, and the LSU students developed and implemented many of the winning techniques in these games, Kooima said.
The winning LSU-led companies and their games are:
Best Audio Design and Best Visual Design:
Dark Tide Software for the game “Rise of the Urchins”
Participating LSU students: Keaton Robinson and Michael Davis
In this game, players are underwater and must throw sea urchins at pirate ships to sink them and steal their gold. “This product just went above and beyond,” Kooima said. “The custom music blended in some nautical elements in keeping with the theme, and the overall playing experience was extremely good.”
Best Interaction Design
B2 Bomber Games for the game “Power Putt”
Participating LSU students: Kevin Cherry and Katherine Herrin
This was a miniature golf game, but the team added the unique element of allowing other players to push their hands on the touch table and tilt the golf course, making it more challenging for the golfing player, and allowing more touch points in the game. “This was an extremely clever way of drawing in the audience,” Kooima said.
Best Bookends
Kenchi Games for the game “Reach”
Participating LSU students: Jason Kincl and Sara Fradella
This company won for adding “very clever and funny” introductions and endings to the game, in which players must grab objects to build a ladder that allows their characters to climb out of a pit, give them a high five, and win. At the end, the winning player can choose how to destroy the remaining players’ characters in the pit, with options such as “Raptor Attack,” which adds an extra creative sequence to the play, Kooima said.
Best Overall Game Play
Magnetic Enigmatic for the game “POL”
Participating LSU students: Jason Meador and Lee Vanderlick
This two-player game is similar to the popular online game “Bejeweled,” but is more interactive and created for the touch table. Balls fall down from the top, and players must stack like items in rows to make them disappear. Extra and discarded balls push toward the other player, who loses when so many balls pile up that they hit the side of the display. “The interaction in this game was complex, deep and well-thought out,” Kooima said. “Overall, all their elements just led to a good game.”
The university plans to continue offering this course once a year, and it will return in the Spring 2011 semester.
For more information about the AVATAR Initiative and the upcoming minor in digital media, please visit www.avatar.lsu.edu.
http://appl003.lsu.edu/unv002.nsf/9faf000d8eb58d4986256abe00720a51/fd2e1bbdd03a217986257721005c06f1?OpenDocument
Ashley Berthelot
LSU Media Relations
225-578-3870
These critical elements are the focus of a course LSU has offered since 2007, in which students work in teams to form “companies” and develop an original video game throughout the course of a semester.
The course is listed in the university’s registration materials as both an art and a computer science course, and the material is interdisciplinary, encouraging students from different academic backgrounds to work together in creating a game, each contributing their strengths to the product. Computer science students work on many of the programming elements, while art students work on storyline and character creation.
LSU offers the video game design class in collaboration with University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC. In the class, which students attend via high-definition video streaming broadcast from Chicago to Baton Rouge, participants learn core concepts to develop and design video games, from storyline to character development to coding.
Jason Leigh, a computer science professor at UIC and director of the university’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, teaches the course from UIC in collaboration with LSU’s Robert Kooima, adjunct faculty in the LSU Department of Computer Science and a post-doctoral researcher with the Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, or AVATAR, Initiative in digital media. Kooima worked with Leigh at the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory before coming to LSU in 2008.
The video game design course will be part of the curriculum for the AVATAR minor in digital media, which will begin in the Fall 2010 semester, allowing students to take courses in different departments to prepare for careers in digital art, animation, electronic composition, video game design and related fields.
“The video game design class has been popular since we first offered it, and its success at LSU was one of many reasons we worked to create the digital media minor,” said Stephen David Beck, Derryl and Helen Haymon Professor of Music and AVATAR lead. “Many college students want to learn the necessary skills to work in these emerging industries, and we hope many of the students who have participated in the video game class will sign up to take other, related courses toward the digital media minor.”
This year, the video game design course had record participation, with 53 students between the two universities. At LSU, there were nine computer science students, 11 art students and one education student participating. The students divided into 12 teams to form companies and, with the exception of one all-UIC group, the companies had an equal balance of LSU and UIC members, who worked together all semester to create an original video game.
Beginning with the 2009 course, Leigh and Kooima began emphasizing games with multi-player, multi-touch capabilities. To give the class a place to experiment with multi-touch gaming, Kooima began building a 52-inch TacTile LCD touch table with high-definition video. The students were able to use this table in rough form to play and display their video games in 2009, but it was completed and available for the 2010 students.
“We always try to emphasize new trends and possibilities in the gaming industry with this course, and a current one is allowing people to touch and interact directly with the game,” Kooima said. “This table gives the students a platform to develop these types of popular games. In the coming semesters, we hope to try other new gaming techniques, such as super-high resolution gaming on tile displays, which occurs on multiple screens simultaneously. We definitely want to keep doing things that are unique.”
As in previous semesters, students spent the final class period of the semester, on Friday, April 30, playing and presenting the video games their “companies” created.
Kooima and a judging panel comprised of representatives from the Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium, Louisiana Tech Park and the Electronic Arts Video Game Test Center in Baton Rouge evaluated the games, which constituted a large component of each student’s final grade. The students had a special guest judge, Tom DeFanti, Ph.D., an internationally recognized pioneer in visualization and virtual reality technologies. DeFanti, who was Leigh’s dissertation adviser and helped establish the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at UIC, was at LSU to speak as part of the AVATAR Lecture Series. He participated in the video game class competition during his visit.
The judges awarded prizes for Best Audio Design; Best Visual Design; Best Technical Achievement, which looked at the computer science elements included in the game; Best Interaction Design, which evaluated how well players could touch and experience the game; Best Bookends, which focused on the titles, sequences and conclusion, elements that Kooima said are important but often overlooked in gaming; and Best Game Play (overall).
With the exception of Best Technical Achievement, which the all-UIC team won, teams with LSU members won in all the other categories, and the LSU students developed and implemented many of the winning techniques in these games, Kooima said.
The winning LSU-led companies and their games are:
Best Audio Design and Best Visual Design:
Dark Tide Software for the game “Rise of the Urchins”
Participating LSU students: Keaton Robinson and Michael Davis
In this game, players are underwater and must throw sea urchins at pirate ships to sink them and steal their gold. “This product just went above and beyond,” Kooima said. “The custom music blended in some nautical elements in keeping with the theme, and the overall playing experience was extremely good.”
Best Interaction Design
B2 Bomber Games for the game “Power Putt”
Participating LSU students: Kevin Cherry and Katherine Herrin
This was a miniature golf game, but the team added the unique element of allowing other players to push their hands on the touch table and tilt the golf course, making it more challenging for the golfing player, and allowing more touch points in the game. “This was an extremely clever way of drawing in the audience,” Kooima said.
Best Bookends
Kenchi Games for the game “Reach”
Participating LSU students: Jason Kincl and Sara Fradella
This company won for adding “very clever and funny” introductions and endings to the game, in which players must grab objects to build a ladder that allows their characters to climb out of a pit, give them a high five, and win. At the end, the winning player can choose how to destroy the remaining players’ characters in the pit, with options such as “Raptor Attack,” which adds an extra creative sequence to the play, Kooima said.
Best Overall Game Play
Magnetic Enigmatic for the game “POL”
Participating LSU students: Jason Meador and Lee Vanderlick
This two-player game is similar to the popular online game “Bejeweled,” but is more interactive and created for the touch table. Balls fall down from the top, and players must stack like items in rows to make them disappear. Extra and discarded balls push toward the other player, who loses when so many balls pile up that they hit the side of the display. “The interaction in this game was complex, deep and well-thought out,” Kooima said. “Overall, all their elements just led to a good game.”
The university plans to continue offering this course once a year, and it will return in the Spring 2011 semester.
For more information about the AVATAR Initiative and the upcoming minor in digital media, please visit www.avatar.lsu.edu.
Ashley Berthelot
LSU Media Relations
225-578-3870
SC10 Faculty/student opportunities
The LSU Center for Computation and Technology encourages YOU to participate in this year's SC10 Conference in New Orleans (November 13-19, 2010). See below several opportunities for faculty and students.
SC is the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. SC10 will feature the latest scientific and technical innovations from around the world. Bringing together scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and managers, SC10 will be the forum for demonstrating how these developments are driving new ideas, new discoveries and new industries. SC10 will feature three special focus areas this year: Climate Simulation, Heterogeneous Computing, and
Data Intensive Computing.
http://sc10.supercomputing.org/?pg=conference.html
SC is the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. SC10 will feature the latest scientific and technical innovations from around the world. Bringing together scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and managers, SC10 will be the forum for demonstrating how these developments are driving new ideas, new discoveries and new industries. SC10 will feature three special focus areas this year: Climate Simulation, Heterogeneous Computing, and
Data Intensive Computing.
http://sc10.supercomputing.org/?pg=conference.html
An Animated Career: LSU’s Stacey Simmons Selected as Technology Leader of the Year
Creating the largest animation festival in the United States, forming a professional consortium to attract new businesses to the state’s capital, working with different state and local agencies to lure EA Sports to Baton Rouge and helping develop a new digital media curriculum for college students might seem like a tall order for one person’s day job.
But these are among the achievements for Stacey Simmons, who was named Louisiana’s Technology Leader of the Year at the Governor’s Technology Awards earlier this spring.
Simmons, who is associate director for economic development at LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, has spent her career finding innovative ways to highlight the intersections between art and technology.
A native of the New Orleans area, Simmons moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of working in the film industry and held production roles with different studios. But after several years there, she decided to return to Louisiana and help establish the film industry in her home state.
After working as an adjunct professor with Tulane University, Simmons came to LSU in 2003 to develop strategic initiatives for the CCT. She wanted to find a way to make high-performance computing technology understandable and accessible to members of the Baton Rouge community. This idea became the Red Stick International Animation Festival.
Red Stick, which Simmons created along with Professor Stephen David Beck in 2005, has grown into the largest animation festival in the United States in only five years and has become a draw for both scientists and artists who are interested in seeing the latest developments in digital media.
Through her work on the festival, Simmons realized the city could benefit from a consortium of local business and government agencies that worked specifically at attracting digital media industries to the state. She founded the Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium, or BRADIC, which encompasses LSU, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and the East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President’s Office. It is the only organization of its kind in the nation, an innovation that was one of the key reasons she was nominated for the highest technology honor in the state.
BRADIC promotes the state’s lucrative tax credit program, talented workforce and teamwork between education and business to animation studios, video game development companies, visual effects houses and other digital media industries to entice them to Louisiana.
These tax incentives for digital businesses and the strong partnerships among key agencies in the area are the primary factors that convinced EA, the world’s leading independent video game developer and publisher, to locate their North American Test Center in Baton Rouge, at LSU South Campus in late 2008.
Another factor in EA’s decision to locate here was the Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, or AVATAR, Initiative to create a new curriculum and research opportunities in digital media. LSU created AVATAR in spring 2008, and Simmons is one of the professors working to develop this program, which will help students learn the skills they need for careers in this exciting and emerging field.
The AVATAR Initiative will launch the university’s first minor in digital media in the fall 2010 semester. To promote the program, Simmons created a lecture series for the spring and fall semesters, which will bring in professionals from various areas of digital media to campus.
“As a professional working in digital media, I often get approached by college students who want jobs as video game developers, animators, artists and much more,” Simmons said. “I am excited to be part of the group that created this new curriculum so we can give students a chance to learn how they can get jobs in this field. And because the digital industry in our state is growing, this program will train students for jobs they can get in this area, which will make them more likely to stay here after graduation.”
Kristen Sunde | Public Relations Manager | LSU Center for Computation & Technology
May 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
SIGGRAPH Research Demonstrations - May 17th
CCT's SIGGRAPH 2010 Committee is hosting a SIGGRAPH Research Demonstrations & Talks session in the CCT Training Room (Johnston 338) on Monday, May 17, from 11:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. Anyone interested in presenting research for inclusion in CCT's exhibit at SIGGRAPH 2010 is invited to participate. Please plan to spend about 15-20 minutes conducting a demonstration or giving a talk that shows what you are working on and how it relates to the conference's key topics. As this session takes place in the afternoon, the SIGGRAPH Committee will provide pizza for attendees.
If you are interested in participating, please e-mail Kristen Sunde at ksunde@cct.lsu.edu by this Thursday, May 13, indicating your preferred time to present your research. This will help us schedule participants for May 17 and ensure we have enough pizza for everyone.
Thank you in advance for your interest and enthusiasm as we progress with plans for SIGGRAPH 2010!
If you are interested in participating, please e-mail Kristen Sunde at ksunde@cct.lsu.edu by this Thursday, May 13, indicating your preferred time to present your research. This will help us schedule participants for May 17 and ensure we have enough pizza for everyone.
Thank you in advance for your interest and enthusiasm as we progress with plans for SIGGRAPH 2010!
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