Vijf wetenschappers presenteren hun onderzoek tijdens de “Game Research Showcase” op Control Conference. Rafael Bidarra van TU Delft maakte deze selectie en zal de sessie hosten (om 16:00 uur in de zaal ‘Cloud 9’).
Dit zijn de vijf onderzoekers en wat ze presenteren:
1: A computational model of navigation in games
Roland Geraerts • Utrecht University
A huge challenge in current games is to simulate thousands of characters in real-time where they pro-actively and realistically avoid collisions with each other and with obstacles present in their environment. This environment contains semantic information (e.g. roads and bicycle lanes, dangerous and pleasant areas), is three-dimensional (e.g. contains bridges where people can walk over and under as well) and can dynamically change (e.g. a bridge partially collapses). We show how to create a generic framework centered around a navigation mesh for such environments and how it can be updated dynamically and efficiently. Next, we show how (groups of) people move and avoid collisions in such environments, based on character profiles and semantics. We run our simulations in realistic environments (e.g. soccer stadiums or train stations) and game levels to study the effectiveness of our methods. Finally, we have created a software package that integrates this research.
After this presentation you will understand why we need a more generic and efficient representation of the navigable areas, why we need a paradigm shift from graph-based to surface-based navigation, and why a path planning algorithm should NOT compute a path.
2: Design for games & play
Ben Schouten • Hogeschool van Amsterdam and TU Eindhoven
In deze presentatie laat ik een aantal sprekende voorbeelden zien van het design onderzoek op het gebied van Games & Play zoals: Spellen die overtuigen (Persuasive Games) samen met Amnesty, Geautomatiseerd Game Design met de DGA en andere industriële partijen, Spellen op het gebied van agressie beheersing bij kinderen met de GGZ, Intelligente speeltuinen samen met Almende, en Games & Televisie met de filmacademie en Submarine. Hierin staan zowel nieuwe technieken als design inzichten centraal.
3: Player modeling
Pieter Spronck • University of Tilburg
Who is the player of a game? What is his motivation to play? What appeals to him, and what drives him away? If a game can determine such qualities of its players, it may be able to adapt to their needs and desires. I will give a brief overview of our research into the possibility to derive a player’s personality, age, and culture from their style of playing the game Battlefield 3.
4: Intelligent characters for soft skills training in serious games
Mariët Theune • University of Twente
Serious games can be used for soft skills training by letting the players experience difficult social situations and learn from these experiences. These games feature virtual characters with which trainees have to interact in different scenarios. This talk gives an overview of our research on providing such characters with intelligence and models of social behaviour, and how these can be used to support learning.
5: Making illusions come true
Elmar Eisemann • Delft University of Technology
Many computer games, special effects and realistic simulations share the need to render complex models and to realistically reproduce physical phenomena. This situation leads to important challenges, especially in the real-time domain. Additionally, image synthesis faces new obstacles, such as the practicality of algorithms for a large variety of devices (workstations, laptops, cellphones, stereo screens…), which makes the production of high-quality imagery a very difficult task. In this talk, we will examine solutions that enable efficient high-quality rendering, by employing new models, algorithms, and even rendering strategies. We will discuss how to produce detailed scenes, complex effects, such as participating media, global illumination or depth of field. We will also cover the topic of apparent quality enhancements, which is particularly interesting, as it illustrates the importance of considering human perception in rendering and enables us to even overcome physical limitations of displays.
