Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy student game 鈥淭he Channeler鈥� won the Most Innovative award and the third place award for Best Visual Quality at the Intel University Games Showcase, held March 2 in San Francisco. As a result, Intel will donate $7,500 worth of equipment to .
The showcase featured student games from 12 game design schools from around the country, including Carnegie Mellon, Drexel University, University of Southern California and New York University. The three award categories were Most Innovative, Best Gameplay and Best Visual Quality.
Recent FIEA graduates Summan Mirza and Derek Mattson led the game demo, which uses eye-tracking hardware called the Tobii EyeX to allow players to control the game with their eyes. The demo showed a player winking, blinking and looking at certain items to solve crimes in a quirky ghost world. A team of 12 students completed the game in seven months as part of their master鈥檚 thesis.
After each presentation, game industry judges asked questions in front of the 250 people in attendance. After 鈥淭he Channeler鈥� finished their presentation, one judge commented, 鈥淯h, wow is all I can say.鈥�
This is the fourth year Intel has put on the showcase, which coincides with the Game Developers Conference, the largest conference in the world for video-game developers.