BC Stories

TU Berlin's Barkerville

Explore the Stories

Barkerville Escape

In partnership with the TU Berlin, UBC, UVic, and the Royal BC Museum, BC Stories has created a short Virtual Reality puzzle game centred around the now historic site of the town of Barkerville, which was the locus of the Cariboo Gold Rush, the largest gold rush that happened in BC.

The team at the Technical University of Berlin had their imaginations captured by this small mining colony that grew rapidly from tents to a town. They used Natural language interactions & speech recognition to create a quiz game intended to educate and elicit curiosity about both the site of the Historic Town of Barkerville and the larger context of the gold rush in BC's formation and colonization.

The Team

Dr. Derek Jacoby

UVic

I'm Derek. I was at Microsoft for about a decade working on the windows team and in Microsoft Research as lead program manager on the speech recognition team. I was the designer and developer of the “How do I” language model in Windows, which allows you, for instance, to say things like “How do I add a user?” and have it bring up the appropriate help page. I left Microsoft wanting to return to Canada and go back to grad school. I received my PhD from University of Victoria last year, and have been doing a lot of web development, some interesting signal processing, working with electronics and embedded systems, and developing VR applications. I am also founder and president of the Victoria Makerspace, a collective tool workshop from which some of our team members are drawn for this project. I am also doing a post-doc with Yvonne at UVic, run a boutique development company called QVirt labs, and am a mentor for a local web development bootcamp called lighthouse labs.

Dr. Yvonne Coady

UVic

I work with the MOD(ularity) Squad (the grooviest gang of students to ever attempt to improve the modularity of system infrastructure software), in the Computer Science Department, in the Faculty of Engineering, at the University of Victoria, Canada. Research Interests: mixed reality systems, citizen science, emerging avenues of advanced modularity across the software stack, and new programming paradigms and future pedagogical directions for immersive applications

Sophi Miethe

TU Berlin

Hey everyone! My name is Sophie Miethe. I’m a bachelor student of “Media Computer Science” at TU Berlin. In my time at university I could already acquire some programming skills but I haven’t worked in a real job with it yet. Alongside my studies I’m working as a dancer/dance teacher.

Some years ago for a lot of people to experience Virtual Reality with glasses was still a thing of the future and now you can buy it everywhere. I have no experiences with VR technologies but I’m really excited to learn and work with it. I’ve always been interested in gaming, developing and storytelling for itself. So this is a great opportunity for me to work and learn in this area. The composition of various components like museum, VR and audience interaction is a great idea! I’m curious how we will implement this and give the players the best possible game and learning experience. I’m looking forward to work with everyone at this international collaborative project!!

Neha Mishra

TU Berlin

My name is Neha Mishra. I am an Indian student, currently pursuing master in Computer Engineering at TU Berlin.

I am deeply interested in the fields of Computer Vision and 3D Imaging. I am familiar with C, C++, MatLab and have basic knowledge of VHDL, Cadence, Oracle and MeshLab. Currently I am serving as a Student research assistant(HiWi) at Computer Vision & Remote Sensing department of TU Berlin. Here, in a small team, using Qtcreator, Github and C++; I am developing a GUI-Tool to evaluate the camera calibrations calculated by Structure-from-Motion (SfM) algorithms. Simultaneously, I am working with Blender, Meshlab & Cmake to have better composition of UV charts for the given compositions of building facades. In the recent past I served as a HiWi on project Robust Camera Self Calibration. In that project I was responsible for acquiring point clouds and marker's position for three dimensional reconstruction of various objects. Also I worked with Meshlab for the creation of three dimensional mesh of the reconstructed point clouds. In my B.Tech. as well I worked on various MatLab based projects, viz. Iris Recognition using Gabor filter and SVM(Support Vector Machines) with UBIRIS database, Real time face recognition using SIFT algorithm and Simulation of OCDMA (Optical Code Division Multiple Access) codes, etc.

I am really very excited to work on this project with such a diverse and knowledgeable experts and team-mates.

Damian Dominik Martinez Dreyer

TU Berlin

I am Damian Dominik Martinez Dreyer, student of Media Computer Science (Medieninformatik) at TU Berlin. Since enabling musical performances and including supporting light in our high schools gym, I have been passionate about the augmentation of human senses and imagination technology is able to offer. Both, the visual and the audible, have been key to my interests and to my choice of major. I have always wanted to bridge technology with real human interaction, leading me to taking part in courses like 'Computer Graphics I and II', 'Introduction to Computer Vision', 'Speech Communication and Speech Signal Processing', 'Usability Engineering', but also seminars on public relations and communication. In an earlier project with students of Medieninformatik, we created an Audio Experince / Soundwalk conveying the life of a student at TU Berlin. I was able to gain experience in imagining, planning, recording and manipulating audio, including binaural effects. Recently, in an Internship at VRnow GmbH in Berlin, a startup that provides virtual real estate visits from building plans, I came into contact with concepts of VR experiences and hands on work in Blender and Python for automatic geometry generation and city modelling. I am experienced in C, C++, Python, Java, Haskell, Javascript and willing to learn.

I would love to apply and combine my knowledge and gain new insights into VR and the multi-modal interaction involved throughout our project.

Samuel Shaw

TU Berlin

My name is Samuel Shaw and I'm originally from Sydney, Australia. I have been living in Berlin for almost 4 years now and am currently completing a Bachelor in Media Computer Science at TU Berlin and working part-time as a Software Test Engineer. I have experience in C, C#, Java, Javascript and have started recently teaching myself Unity but I am always keen to learn new languages and technologies. I began playing computer games at around the same time I started walking so I am very excited to be able to contribute to this project and to immerse myself in the world of VR. I am looking forward to working with you all!

Daniel Steinmetz

TU Berlin

I'm Daniel and a student of “Media Computer Science” at TU Berlin and currently in my 6th term. During my study I had the opportunity to gain insights in a couple of different fields, including Computer Graphics, Image Processing, Software Engineering and Functional Programming. Beside my study I worked as a iOS Developer for a German messenger client for soccer fans called “IMFootball”. While I also have a solid background with other programming languages, I look forward for this new project beyond the Apple universe and hope to learn a lot of new stuff regarding multi modal interaction in a such a practical project that is open for new ideas.

Satria Bayuaji

TU Berlin

My name is Satria and I came here to Berlin from Jakarta, Indonesia 4 years ago to pursuit my Bachelor degree. I'm currently in the last year of the bachelor “Media Computer Science” program at TU Berlin. In the past 4 years I've learned different things such as Speech Technologies, Databases, Software Engineering, Functional Programming and Web Technologies. For the last 1,5 years I've been working in an android team for a news company. The first year was spent on establishing an environment for the automated tests of the android app and writing the tests. 6 Months ago I started going deeper into the development. I'm really excited to learn even more stuffs from this project and contribute for it!