The Media Computing Project (Winter '23/'24)

Instructors

For any questions about the class, please contact Sebastian Hueber.

Syllabus

MCP this semester revolves around a topic that elegantly combines multiple domains of media computing and HCI: You will create a multiplayer rhythm game with multimodal inputs and developer support to add new tracks. During this course you will learn:

• the role of HCI in software and game design
• writing a GUI app for a desktop OS (macOS)
• playback and manipulatoin of digital media like audio and video
• detecting the human as input from camera feeds with basic computer vision

You will work in one of three unique teams. Each team will implement a specific part

• The game team will create the main application of our rhythm game. They will implement not only the core gameplay, but also the settings menu, multiplayer support, a character editor, etc.
• The controller team will implement a variety of input techniques for the game, ranging from software-based ones like body tracking to dedicated hardware.
• The content editor team will provide code to read and write tracks for our game. A graphical editor app will allow users to add new tracks to the game and tag the data correctly, e.g. marking beats and placing items at specific playback positions.

All Final Projects from the Last Semester

Here are links to all the final group projects of the last semester, complete with entertaining video trailers, documentation, and source code to download and try out the games on your computer. The games all chose PyGame for their implementation.