Spacebox Interactive Game in Showcase at 2017 Game Developers Conference

Spacebox at Art Hop 2016.

The Champlain College Emergent Media Center's Sandbox team has been selected to showcase their SpaceBox project for alt.ctrl.GDC 2017. The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is the world's largest professional game industry event with over 27,000 attendees. alt.ctrl.GDC is one of GDC's most acclaimed interactive spaces, an on-site showcase of alternative control schemes and interactions in games that is returning for its fourth year to the conference.

SpaceBox was designed and constructed by an Emergent Media Center (EMC) team of Champlain students mentored by Professor Ken Howell and Terry Sehr, MFA alumni. SpaceBox is meant to bring childhood wonder to life, a magical time when we make believe, taking ourselves on any adventure we imagine. Using an ordinary cardboard box, the team blends reality and imagination. Sitting in the box, you control your character, mimicking child-like play, and going on an outer space adventure! By simply shifting your body, you direct your ship, guiding it through a gauntlet of asteroids towards your goal. To combat enemy fleets in this environment, you can activate a force-field and blaster with the box flaps. This simple, full-body experience captures the essence of imaginative play!

Developed using Unity and Arduino.
SpaceBox student team:
James Keats - Advanced Programmer
Amanda Ledwidge - 3D Modeler
Jake Pierce - Lead Interactive Designer
Robin Shafto - Hardware Developer/Programmer
Ricky Rizzo - Creative Media Artist
Dennis Dysart - Interactive Designer
Steven Margolin and Devin Carlin- Designers

Adam Walker - Sr. Project Manager, EMC
Jen Adrian - Creative & Communication Manager, EMC

Get the details on GDC 2017: http://www.gdconf.com/events/altctrlgdc.html
Watch the SpaceBox video: https://vimeo.com/192202218/f7a1f03e93


The Emergent Media Center is an academic Center of Excellence at Champlain College that, in partnership with industry, public institutions, and nonprofits, creates a laboratory/studio environment in which students collaborate with each other, faculty and clients to develop new concepts, processes, uses and applications for games and other emergent media. Learn more at https://www.champlain.edu/centers-of-excellence/emergent-media-center


Founded in 1878, Champlain College is a small, not-for-profit, private college in Burlington, Vermont, with additional campuses in Montreal, Canada, and Dublin, Ireland. Champlain offers a traditional undergraduate experience from its beautiful campus overlooking Lake Champlain and over 90 residential undergraduate and online undergraduate and graduate degree programs and certificates. Champlain's distinctive career-driven approach to higher education embodies the notion that true learning occurs when information and experience come together to create knowledge. Champlain College is included in the Princeton Review's The Best 384 Colleges: 2019 Edition. For the fourth year in a row, Champlain was named a "Most Innovative School" in the North by U.S. News & World Report's 2019 "America's Best Colleges,” and a “Best Value School” and is ranked in the top 100 “Regional Universities of the North” and in the top 25 for “Best Undergraduate Teaching.” Champlain is also featured in the Fiske Guide to Colleges for 2019 as one of the "best and most interesting schools" in the United States, Canada and Great Britain and is a 2019 College of Distinction. For more information, visit champlain.edu.