Video Games
Game design and development across multiple platforms — indie prototypes, game jams, and full-featured experiences.
Multiplayer Tetris
Performant, parameterized local co-op Tetris with seamless multiplayer on arbitrary user-specified grid size, player count, and game speed.
Son of Sara — LLM-Based Embodied Conversational Agent
An LLM-powered embodied conversational agent and successor to the SARA virtual agent platform, developed at CMU ArticuLab and INRIA. Features a modular real-time pipeline with ASR, LLM, TTS, predictive turn-taking (VAP), and a Unity-based virtual body with JSON-driven gesture, facial expression, and lip-sync control.
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Kersnoofle ThreadBrawlers
A brawler game where you fight against other redditors' Snoo avatars to see who comes out on top, developed at Schell Games.
InteLLA — AI Tutor Avatar Pipeline
A photorealistic humanoid avatar generation pipeline for AI-powered tutors, built for Equmenopolis Inc.
Digital Twin of Festivity
WebGL interactive virtual festival celebrating Chichibu Yomatsuri and Hadaka Matsuri festivals in Japan, built for Equmenopolis.
SCHEMA Museum Virtual Tour Guide
An interactive virtual tour guide experience for museum environments, built using the SCHEMA system.
Galaxy Formation
Multi-platform educational app depicting how dark matter particles clump together over billions of years to form stars, planets, and galaxies — powered by a real-time n-body simulation. Made in collaboration with CMU Physics and the NSF.
Mount Lebanon Virtual Pet
A holographic AI virtual pet dragon that lives in a school classroom, responding to touch via Leap Motion, speech recognition, and facial tracking — built for Mellon Middle School to support social-emotional learning.
Quaker Valley Hamster World
An Android virtual pet game and LAN server built for special education classrooms, where students care for animated hamsters as a tool for learning independence and self-regulation.
Articulab RAPT — Rapport-Aware Peer Tutor
A virtual peer tutor that builds rapport with students and fosters socio-emotional awareness to improve communication, collaboration, and Algebra learning in 6th–8th graders. John Choi overhauled the Unity environment with modern real-time rendering techniques — bringing the virtual classroom from PS2-era to PS4-quality graphics.
Articulab SARA — Socially-Aware Robot Assistant
A 3D virtual humanoid AI agent showcased at the World Economic Forum in Davos (2017) and Tianjin (2016). Personalizes interaction and improves task performance by building rapport through social intelligence. John Choi built the new Unity 2017 framework with JSON-driven body animation, blendshape facial expressions, lip-sync, and TTS.
Articulab SCIPR — Sensing Curiosity in Play and Responding
A mixed-reality educational system using virtual human agents, augmented reality toys, and multimodal sensing to foster curiosity and exploration in elementary school students. John Choi built the virtual peer's gesture/expression system and an automatic fiducial-marker card tracking system that recognizes 27 marker positions at 5 FPS.
Drunk Painting
2-player competitive paint-splattering game using Myo armbands (EMG + gyroscopes). Built in 48 hours at Global Game Jam 2015 Pittsburgh. Won Google's Technical Achievement Award.
Decimal Point
NSF-funded educational amusement park game teaching middle school students decimals through interactive minigames. Built at CMU HCII with Bruce McLaren and Jodi Forlizzi.
Illuminate
Wiimote-controlled flashlight game built in 48 hours at Global Game Jam 2014 Pittsburgh. Things are not what they seem — discover the truth by illuminating the world.
Team BitBot
1 or 2 player 2.5D cooperative action platformer developed at CMU Game Creation Society. One player controls Bit (jump, no shoot) via keyboard; the other controls Bot (shoot, no jump) via mouse. Won GCS Gold Award.
Life in a Box
Award-winning automatic maze museum generator. Users supply images, music, and wallpapers — the program creates a random explorable virtual gallery in first person. Won CMU 15-112 Term Project Grand Prize.
Monster Shroud
Experimental Kinect + Wiimote first-person shooter where players physically move their body to control the character, developed at CMU Game Creation Society.