Inside the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University

DigitalMediaNet: Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center was founded in 1999 by drama and arts management professor Don Marinelli and the late Randy Pausch, professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design. An independent center housed in neither the School of Computer Science nor the College of Fine Arts, the Entertainment Technology Center is headquartered in a riverfront technology park along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, Penn., directly across from an old steel mill site that is now a mixed-use commercial-residential development designed to blend into the adjacent National Historic District. Its hallways are a pop-culture explosion (geek skewing sci-fi, where a life-size carbonite Han Solo statue leans next to Lara Palmer’s image hanging on a wall above a Blade Runner poster), the men’s room decorated in a Super Mario Brothers World 1-1 motif.