Team
Isabella Chen
3D Artist
Isabella is a 3D artist who focuses on environment art. She graduated from New York University, where she studied 3D production pipeline in NYU Game Center. Isabella has worked on several creative projects in ETC, including Mic Check – a rap game which aims to leverage Generative AI through the medium of rap to empower players to express themselves creatively. Her goal is to create is to create game environments that are realistic and rich with storytelling.
Esther Jeon
2D Artist
Esther (HaeJoon) Jeon is a designer with a BFA in Graphic Design from Pratt Institute, where she explored branding, UI/UX, and interactive media. While her background is rooted in design, her passion lies in games and the ways they combine storytelling, interactivity, and creativity. At the ETC, she is excited to collaborate on projects that expand her skills in game development and creative technology. Her goal is to grow as a creative technologist.
Ean McFadden
Producer
Graduating from Ohio University with a major in Games and Animation, a Theatre and VR Corollary, and a Business Minor, Ean brings a variety of different backgrounds that influences the work he makes. While at the ETC, Ean has further developed his skills in sound design and production while exploring opportunities to further his own interests, such as designing dark rides and writing narratives for games. Ean’s 1st year Spring project was Onion Future, a game designed for the Playdate, a retro-inspired handheld console where he served as the project’s writer. Ean’s previous project was the Little Owl Construction Co. which is a collaboration between the ETC’s Outreach, Extension, and Engagement department and the Boys & Girls Club of Western Pennsylvania to bring the fundamentals of the ETC to sixth to eight graders through a unique storytelling opportunity, where he was acting as one of the project’s co-producers and a sound designer.
Arthur Tang
Programmer
Arthur earned his degree in Game Design & Interactive Media from the University of California, Irvine. He focuses on designing engaging gameplay systems and polishing details to deliver the best user experience. In his recent projects, he has taken on multiple roles as producer, game designer, and programmer, leveraging his skills to determine what’s achievable and what’s best for the team. Arthur also brings a strong esports background to his work—during college, he played collegiate Overwatch for UC Irvine as a scholarship player. At the ETC, he’s excited to continue creating meaningful interactive experiences that combine his technical expertise with his competitive gaming insights.
Yixing Xu
Artist / Programmer
Harley Xu studied product design as an undergraduate and discovered a passion for game design through exposure to digital media technology. At ETC, Harley primarily focuses on 3D art, specializing in environment art. He aims to strengthen artistic fundamentals and understand various aspects of game development, enabling greater flexibility in creating game assets to meet team requirements. With a future goal of becoming a level artist, he strives to achieve a higher level of artistic proficiency.
Faculty
Ralph Vituccio
Faculty Advisor
Ralph Vituccio is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), as well as teaching in the IDeATe and the English Departments at CMU. At the ETC, Ralph lead a number of award-winning student interactive projects dealing with social issues such as an interactive graphic novel addressing sexual assault on college campus and a Virtual Reality interactive experience exploring racial profiling which was presented at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.
As an independent artist, Vituccio has received numerous grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Region Media Arts Fellowship Program and the National Endowment for the Arts. His documentary, “PERFORMANCE: The Living Art”, won an Artist Distinction Award at the 1990 Berlin International Film Festival and has aired nationally on several PBS stations and internationally in several countries. Another documentary, “When The Video Came”, considers the early formation of video as an art form and profiles many of the original pioneers in the field and has been shown internationally.
His 2010 documentary, “IN SERVICE: Iraq to Pittsburgh”, explored a different facet of the Iraq War as seen through the eyes of local soldiers, government officials and journalists. The film weaves war footage shot by soldiers themselves, interviews, and still photography into a cohesive narrative on the human cost of war.
Ralph’s film, “SHIPBREAKERS”, (2014), takes place on the beaches of Alang, India where over 300 supertankers and cruise ships are run aground and torn apart by hand by thousands of impoverished workers. “Shipbreakers”, won The Best Feature Documentary Award at the Global International Film Festival in San Francisco. It was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Madrid and Lucerne International Film Festivals and won the Best Editing Award at the Global Film Festival of Boston.
In 2015, Vituccio and Andres Tapia-Urzua presented their interactive video art installation, “El Oraculo Caracol”, at the Havana International Biennale in Cuba.
Vituccio has received several academic Simon ProSEED grants with Martha Harty for their interactive educational series teaching collaborative skills training and conflict mediation skills. The modules are currently being used in the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) across campus.
Vituccio has produced and directed several interactive VR and i-docs on the Holocaust as well as on the Haenyeo, the women free-divers of Korea. His current work in Virtual Reality and interactive documentary have won a 2018 Google-Tribeca grant and as well as showing in numerous festivals. Haenyeo, Virtual Reality, won best VR at the VRE festival in Rome. Italy.
Haenyeo, his short documentary, has recently been an official selection in several film festivals including Docs Without Borders, Paris Ethnographic Film festival, Rome DOC festival, Rome Prism awards, and Pgh Shorts film festival among others.
Ralph has presented at South-By-South-West, SIGGRAPH, i-Docs Symposium, Games for Change, Tribeca Film Festival and many more.
Scott Stevens
Faculty Consultant
Scott Stevens has extensive experience in the areas of games and augmented and virtual reality for education. He has been involved with multimedia research and development for over forty years. Scott began his career at CMU in 1987 in the Software Engineering Institute where he and his research team created the world’s first digital video CD-ROM, a virtual reality learning system that allowed users to carry on conversations with simulated personae.
In 1996 Scott moved to the Human Computer Interaction Institute where he was a co-principle investigator of the Informedia Digital Video Library project. Informedia research applied speech recognition, image processing and machine learning to automatically analyse video. For that work he received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence. Also beginning in 1996, he taught part-time at the then newly created Entertainment Technology center. Scott joined the ETC full-time in 2008.
Recently, Scott was the principal investigator on a multi-year research grant to develop games that teach STEM concepts to children, while improving social and emotional learning. This grant was funded by the ENGAGE Program of United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under the mandate to ensure a strong, scientifically literate workforce.
Scott received his B.S. and M.S.Ed. degrees in physics from Northern Illinois University and his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has spoken internationally on computer science and artificial intelligence’s impact on education and interactive entertainment and has written over one hundred professional papers, talks and book chapters. He is a holder of three patents related to digital video and Synthetic Interviews.
Scott Stevens joined the ETC in 1996.