Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University, previously Head of Research at Electronic Arts (USA)

John Buchanan is a Professor at the prestigious Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University, and previously Head of Research at Electronic Arts (EA), the world’s largest games publisher.

In 1985 John wrote a game that he released into shareware and received a check from Germany for 10 marks. 

Realizing that game design was not his future he enrolled in a M.Sc. at the University of Toronto.  In 1993 John joined the University of Alberta where he pursued his doctoral research in Non-Photorealistic rendering.  His main learning from this research was that the role of a computer scientist in this area is to enhance the creative abilities of an artist, rather than to try to replace them.

In 1998 John worked at Radical entertainment for 5 months then joined Electronic Arts as head of the research group.  His role as head of the research group then extended to Director, Advanced Technology (acting CTO).  In addition to these roles John was always building and maintaining relationships with University researchers.  In 2002 John was asked to take on the role of University Research Liaison Dude full time.  He pursued this job for 4 years. 

During John’s tenure at EA he grew very fond of visiting the Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburg.  He liked the basic premise of the program so much that in 2006 he joined the teaching faculty of the ETC.  Currently John is the CS Pacific Rim professor for the ETC.  He is residing with the Australia campus at this time. 

John is interested in the development of tools for rapid exploration of interactive world ideas.  He believes that current prototyping tools are too far down the production pipeline and that more focus should be paid to pre-production tools for the industry.