Orlando Trip #2: TEA / SATE, Day 2

Today was the second part of the conference, which had the technology and experience parts of the conference. The technology portion was very interesting. One person talked about a lot of projects he was working on involving his shadow recognition system, which is similar to the PlayMotion system we use here at the ETC in our Building Virtual Worlds class. He's also worked with the ETC before on a fountain in Atlantic City. There was also someone from Thinkwell who talked about a lot of new and interesting technologies he found through viral videos and other places on the web. Finally there was someone from Electronic Arts who talked about their development phases for video games.

The afternoon session this time was about experience. Yves Pepin was the focus of this part, and he showed off a lot of his work, including his production of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. It was interesting to see all of the different experiences he had created.

The day concluded with a trip to Give Kids the World Village. 14 people from the conference came over to the village and we gave them a quick tour. We showed off all the past ETC projects that we had done for GKTW. We also showed them the pillow machine and talked about how we're redesigning it this semester. They all were very interested in what we were doing and they said that they had a great time. I'm glad so many people came out and visited, because GKTW is an amazing place.

In general, the SATE conference was a nice start in trying to get a basis and a general understanding of what everyone in the industry is doing, and why they perform their jobs in certain ways. Hopefully next year's conference will be even better!

We stayed at GKTW for Village Idol, and the children that performed were amazing! They're all so adorable and doing their best, and we are inspired by their effort. We hope tomorrow goes well.

And what day would be complete without some mini golf?