We want to understand how technological tools allow people to best express their creativity, and support the flow and sharing of creative ideas between people.

Below are examples of research projects that GVU faculty and students are currently working on:

Jigsaw: Visualization for Investigative Analysis on Documents
We are developing a system called Jigsaw that helps investigators explore and understand collections of unstructured and semi-structured text documents. In essence, Jigsaw helps people "put the pieces together" and gain a deeper understanding of text documents through human-centered, interactive exploration of the documents and the entities within them. It is a visual analytics system that can be used in domains such as law enforcement, investigative reporting, business intelligence, and academic research. Jigsaw provides a collection of visualizations that each portray different aspects of the documents, including connections between different entities.
Information Interfaces

LiquidText: a New Way to Interact with Documents
We are creating a different way to read text, where the document is no longer a fixed, monolithic unit, but rather a flexible representation to be arranged, embellished and structured by the reader. Through this flexibility, one can manipulate a text to best support finding, recording, and communicating the meaning contained within it. To enable this fluid, flexible document representation, we take advantage of recent advances in touch technology, allowing people to use natural hand movements and gestures to perform these manipulations of a text. We will present an interactive demonstration of this system to show an idea of what we are creating.
Pixi Lab

Urban Remix
UrbanRemix is a participatory mobile phone system and web interface for recording, browsing and mixing audio that allows users to explore the unique sounds of their urban environment, documenting and listening to their surroundings to build a local acoustic identity. The project includes four components: 1) mobile phone software with which anyone can record and contribute geo-tagged sounds and images (Android and iPhone) 2) a web site where users can browse, remix and share those sounds on an intuitive map-based interface 3) a live performance featuring DJs mixing their own music from the database of sounds 4) a series of workshops and public events at schools and community centers for youth and adults to discover and document the sounds of their environment.
Center for Music Technology

Virtual Ecosystems
We will present a prototype educational application for science teachers learning about science and digital media through the NASA ePDN Network. This application focused on a problem-based inquiry model of learning about the science involved in studying global climate changes in specific ecosystems.
ADAM Lab

Digital Improv
This project explores how studies of the cognition employed by actors in improvisational theatre can be used to build intelligent agents capable of improvising in a theatrical setting.
ADAM Lab

Design Visualization
Real-time visualization of architectural environments using game engine technologies. Georgia Tech 3D campus and the Peachtree Corridor project will be demonstrated.
Imagine Lab

Collaborative Creativity via TableTop
This study adopts Finke's design to compare creativity process between individuals and groups through paper and an interactive tabletop display by adopting Finke’s imagery experiment.
ACME Lab

Mobile Alternate Reality Health Gaming
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are interactive narratives that layer a fictional story world on top of a real world. Players move about the real world in order to progress through a storyline. ARGs are limited by their dependency on a human puppetmaster and on references to specific locations and landmarks. Mobile ARGs facilitate healthy behavior because they require players to move around the real world. Key to mobile ARG health gaming is scalability, which we address through technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of novel games by end-users. We present weQuest, a suite of technologies to overcome limitations of ARGs through intelligent tools for end-user authoring of location-specific ARG storylines.
Entertainment Intelligence Lab

Computer Game Plot Adaptation
Role-playing games, and other types of contemporary video games, usually contain a main storyline consisting of several causally related quests. As players have different motivations, tastes and preferences, it can be beneficial to customize game plotlines. In this work, we are developing player modeling techniques and an offline algorithm for adapting human-authored game plotlines for computer role-playing games to suit the unique needs of individual players, thereby customizing gaming experiences and enhancing re-playability.
Entertainment Intelligence Lab

Intelligent Virtual Cinematography
Virtual cinematography refers to the cinematic projection of scenes occurring in a 2D or 3D graphical environment onto a flat screen, with a virtual camera serving the role of a physical one. An intelligent virtual cinematography system uses artificial intelligence processes to automatically position a camera in the graphical environment in order to capture a scene in a meaningful way. We are developing systems that can automatically produce machinima – movies produced in graphical environments such as those provided by computer games – given a script, a virtual world, and a set of key cinematic knowledge.
Entertainment Intelligence Lab

ACT: Learning Functional Models of Complex System
In this project, we investigate the benefits of helping students construct functional models of complex biological systems through the use of a software modeling environment, interactive simulations, and a function-oriented virtual textbook.
Design Intelligence Lab

BDC: emBodied Digital Creativity
Extending common coding theory from neuroscience, we investigate how the mental connection between players and game avatars might be leveraged to augment players' cognition. To examine this question, we have designed and developed a tangible puppet interface and 3D virtual environment that are tailored to optimize the mapping between player and avatar, to the extent players can recognize their own avatars through body movement recognition. Our system draws on traditional puppeteering techniques and has applications in both artistic performances and scientific studies of cognition.
Synaesthic Media Lab

Tangible Anchoring
Tangible Anchoring explores potential practices for news reporting and analysis afforded by the convergence of tabletop computing, mobile user-generated content, the Web, and broadcast media channels. We are exploring how these technologies could be used to increase the sense of participation in the viewer's experience of current events through co-discovery with newscasters of how opinions differ and real-time contributions to the on-air debate. Our current implementation, built on the KinoPuzzle story engine, features multiple viewpoints from reporters presented using a tangible tabletop broadcast anchordesk, assuming multiple camera angles, two or much anchors/discussants, multiple displays, and issues-based polling/reporting using mobile phones.
Synaesthic Media Lab

Pathways
Pathways visualizes the simulation of bio-chemical networks using a Tangible User Interface (TUI) approach. In current practice in systems biology, researchers run simulation programs that model different experimental parameters such as concentrations inside cells and reaction speeds. These parameters are adjusted to discover hidden patterns in the reaction network, often by plotting the output using graphs. By adopting TUIs for visualization, we believe that researchers will be able to manipulate these parameters more easily, and also see the system-wide effects of their manipulation across the reaction network. Our first attempt is to visualize the reaction network on an interactive tabletop display. Researchers control the parameters with tangible objects and their hands, allowing them to change parameters in a continuous fashion, and focus on understanding the effects of this manipulation, rather than on programming or entering numerical values.
Synaesthic Media Lab

WorkTop
The WorkTop project explores how multi-touch tabletop interfaces can be used for interdisciplinary collaboration on design tasks. We are designing and developing a multi-user tabletop sketching application that takes into account previous research on interface and interaction design for collaboration around digital tabletops. We are conducting user evaluations to determine whether this application can be useful for workplace collaboration.
Synaesthic Media Lab

ROSS API
The ROSS (Responsive Objects, Surfaces and Spaces) API is a way for tangible applications to operate seamlessly across a variety of tangible input devices and platforms. It allows applications to exchange information about the devices they are running on and obtain real-time data about tangible and touch interactions from other devices. In a ROSS world, you can use your mobile phone as a controller to play games on the digital coffee table in your living room; and your guests can join in with their phones too.
Synaesthic Media Lab