Welcome to ACME lab! A Creativity Machine Environment! We like the acronym of ACME, since it means the highest point, and also refers to the fictional company in Looney Tunes, which is A Company that Makes Everything! Why creativity machine?
“Aly in Wonderland” is a VR prototype designed for Microsoft-Acer and Vive. Inspired by Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice in Wonderland, players enter into a VR fantasy world to chase the March Hare through impossible spaces in order to retrieve the ruby jewel that the Queen of Hearts has lost from her crown. Players will be able to experience VR elements such as “growing” and “shrinking” within the game, as well as interacting with other virtual objects relevant to the narrative.
TRANSMEDIA STORYSCAPE The story of The Ghost Club is bigger than just a feature film ‚ it inhabits a complex world with a deep history and mythology that engages its audience members, inviting them into the Ghost Club storyscape. The concept of the Club, its team members, and the reality and rules of this world are introduced through a variety of non-traditional media channels, web series, social networks, online games, augmented reality mobile applications, and more.
In a race against the clock, players embark on a dangerous adventure. Within moments, the journey goes haywire. Lost and alone, the player finds themselves stranded. In this VR interactive narrative, players fight to survive the dangerous landscape. Utilizing Oculus Rift, Unity, and unique interaction paradigms, Ares explores a wide range of new techniques in VR storytelling. This distinctive, immersive experience will test user's survival skills and offer an exciting challenge.
ARToss is a multiplayer game built using Argon using a NodeJS web server with WebSockets.
This project helps teach STEM concepts with an audio-enabled version of the Lemonade Stand Game, in which visually impaired players (or any player that wants to experience a game that is sound dependent) need to manage their own stand while factoring in weather, local events, advertisement, and pricing in order to maximize profit for their business.
Electronic sports, or esports, are not only an economic juggernaut but also an exciting domain to explore human-computer interactions and new business strategies. Team 1 of the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) class focuses on the applications of mixed reality technologies to bring the excitement of esports anywhere through mobile technologies and simple sensors. This team works with industry partners including Ghost Gaming, Atlanta Reign, and Hi-Rez Studios to explore new business strategies and applications of mixed reality through user-centered designed applications.
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Augmented Reality gaming promises new ways for humans to engage with their physical environment by overlaying gameplay elements via a head-mounted display. We present an artificial intelligence technique to automatically generate novel gameplay content for mixed-reality environments. We demonstrate the technique with a game we call "Augmented Reality Lemmings", a platform game in which the level content was procedurally generated.
Game design is a difficult and costly practice. We developed a machine learning-based method for automatically generating games. We feed our system a series of gameplay videos of different games. Our system then leverages a technique we've developed called conceptual expansion to recombine its knowledge of game design to produce novel games.
A virtual reality rhythm game that uses a motion capture suit as its controller.
We present a demonstration of a level-authoring tool with a co-creative agent informed by knowledge it derived from interactions with human designers.
This project studies ways to address counterfeiting through supply network designs and policies. Of particular interest is how such designs and policies may produce unintended effects. A large-scale interactive simulation model has been developed as a test-bed for various designs and policies to demonstrate their effect and their interactions. The policy-maker can execute the model with his or her policy and design choices, and the visual interface will show the results.
Dear Games
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Dear Games is an educational program collaboration between Charis Circle, members of the GA Tech Game Studio and Different Games Collective. We offer inclusive events to support diverse participation in videogame developement and culture at the South's oldest independent feminist bookstore, Charis Books and More, with consideration to the ways that longstanding feminist community organizations can inform contemporary efforts to increase diversity in STEM.
Exergames, or exertion video games, are interactive, exercise based video games that are a promising in-home approach to physical activity, therapeutic and rehabilitation training, and social interaction for older adults. Research shows that older users have difficulty using exergames due to overly complex interfaces, difficult gestures, and an overall lack of training and familiarity with these systems.
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Technology is changing the scope and quality of healthcare through applications such as telemedicine and home health technology by offering a cost-effective and accessible means to manage chronic disease. People are increasingly taking a proactive role in monitoring and maintaining their health, e.g., monitoring blood pressure to prevent stroke, or measuring blood sugar levels to regulate diabetes. One of the most pressing health issues we face today is a stroke.
The Digital World and Image Group focuses on two main areas: virtual spaces and real-time imagery gathered from them. We see game spaces and game media as important forms of self-expression.
Dino-Store is a persuasive game that was designed to use gamification way to communicate with people and raise awareness on COVID-19. The game’s setting is grocery shopping and the mechanic indicates that how different protection strategies, such as wearing mask, keeping social distance can affect people’s infection chances in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Part of the fun of computer games is to master the skills necessary to complete the game. Challenge tailoring is the problem of matching the difficulty of skill-based events over the course of a game to a specific player's abilities. We have devised a data-driven approach to predict changes in players' skill mastery over time. By modeling players' skill mastery, we are able to dynamically select game content that challenges individual players at the ideal level, avoiding frustration and boredom.
This study employs gaming technologies and techniques to create an intelligent encapsulated conversational agent (ECA) to act as a virtual coach who will lower the cognitive effort required by prostate cancer patients to understand key aspects of decision-making, provide more appropriate reference points from which patients more accurately interpret personal risk, and frame information to optimize the patient's chances of applying his own preferences and values to the decision at hand.
The Emergent Game Group {egg} was formed in 2006 by Georgia Tech Digital Media faculty member Celia Pearce to investigate the many facets of emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds, and to explore design strategies that promote emergent social behavior.
As our Master's Project for the MS HCI degree, David and I worked closely with collegiate esports teams and athletes to understand how teams communicate and improve their comm. practices. Through a UCD process, we gained insights into their experiences and needs to then design a web-based VOD review tool that allows team to capture their thoughts and analysis of the games that they have played.
You are on a mission to foreign planets with the company of your captain. While landing on the planet in a transporter, you need to show hospitality to the alien representative with gestures since no translators to the alien culture are present. You need to mimic the gestures of the alien representative and establish a diplomatic relationship.
Blood transfusions rates are steadily decreasing during the covid-19, and 18-24 is lowest represented population. Many college students have never donated because they are not wired to the banked blood shortage problem. Therefore, we are seeking design solutions to increase motivation to donate blood amongst eligible college students, aged 18-24, specifically focusing on those who have never donated before.
This Phase II SBIR proposal submitted by Potluck LLC and GT seeks to expand and rigorously test over 2 years an online social engagement platform (OneClick) for adults aged 65-85, including those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The long-term goal is to benefit health outcomes, such as survival and the mitigation of dementia, which are affected by social engagement or lack thereof. Older adults are at risk of social isolation, and therefore, negative health and quality-of-life outcomes. The existing OneClick platform connects people in different locations over shared interests in a live,
Impossible Spaces is a technique that uses self-overlapping architecture to incorporate natural walking in virtual environments without the use of any other movement techniques like teleportation or portals. I am showcasing some design interventions that when applied to self overlapping architecture enhance the believability of the space and might even lower the threshold of detection of the architectural manipulation. These design techniques can then be used by VR narrative developers to futher enhance the believability of their VR narratives.
The Entertainment Intelligence Lab focuses on computational approaches to creating engaging and entertaining experiences. Some of the problem domains they work on include, computer games, storytelling, interactive digital worlds, adaptive media and procedural content generation.
Esports athletes are professional gamers that compete at high levels of competition under incredible pressure. Looking to other domains in industrial-organizational psychology and military trainings, this Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) team tackles research questions relating to team organization, structure, and community building within esports. Students are working with professional teams local to Atlanta, as well as college teams across the United States, to deploy new kinds of practice and training strategies informed by academic literature. These new practice strategies may give tea
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We developed a suite of educational digital games for chronically ill children that help us build upon the learning science theory of islands of expertise and contributes to educational game studies by exploring a interrelated core set of games that can teach specific science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) content in the context of complex systems.
The complexity of television shows has been increasing. In order to follow a story, viewers might be expected to stay abreast of more plot threads, remember more characters, and retain information introduced in earlier seasons. Media technology has made the job easier by allowing viewers to review in various ways; they may replay a scene or entire episodes, they may visit an online forum for fans, or they may play a video game that is related to that story. Game of Game of Thrones is a video game design intended to explore how a video game could enhance the viewing of a television series.
The Georgia Tech Game Studio is a game design and development organization for facilitating the creation of novel games. The Studio aims to increase the Institute's reputation in the production of original games through commercial success and participation in competitions.
We have a multi-year project exploring how game performance and player behavior can be used to perform scientifically valid cognitive, personality, skill, and behavioral measures. This project involves hypothesizing about how game mechanics, levels, situations etc. could assess aspects of a player that are currently measured via validated traditional tests/activities/interviews, designing games around these hypotheses, and running user studies. Another aspect of this work is exploring how theming, feedback, game type influence the assessment validity and the players' desire to play the game.
Most online learning platforms have a good enrollment rate, but the completion rate for courses is poor. Through a qualitative study (interviews, surveys, participatory design activitity) we tried to get a broader understanding on how gamification could be used as a motivation for learning, including the social context of participants. Further, we developed a gamified mobile application for practicing python and ran a longitudinal study (over 4 weeks of remote use, with intermediate surveys, and followed by interviews) to get an in-depth understanding of game elements that motivate learning.
The focus of the project is on designing an in-car gaming experience for passengers. While in-vehicle entertainment is a growing field, we see the opportunity to design in-vehicle entertainment through digital games.
Gaming & Esports Applied Research (GEAR) is a transdisciplinary team of computer scientists and engineers, health professionals, graphic designers, human-computer interaction scientists, and cognitive psychologists with the capacity to rapidly prototype, develop, evaluate, and deploy video ga
Gaming for good
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A framework to use machine learning techniques to generate rhythm action game stages from music
Gundam VR is a virtual reality adaptation of the Japanese animated television show Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans. In this virtual reality experience, you will take the role of protagonist Mikazuki Augus, a young soldier that pilots a giant robot, known as a Gundam, in battle as a mercenary. Left paralyzed on his right side due to the physical strain from piloting his Gundam, Mikazuki is only able to control his entire body when plugged into his robot, the Barbatos.
Virtual reality as a medium and design space continues to grow, but we suggest that the range of experiences offered rarely stray from the first person perspective. Most experiences, especially video games, have the user directly embody their avatar. In Perspective is a project that explores alternate interfaces that place the user outside of the body of the avatars they inhabit and uses multiple forms of puppetry as design references for new interfaces that blend procedural and physical motion.
Augmented-reality is a technology that can revolutionize children's education and entertainment. In studies of adolescents and adults, it has been shown to have measurable benefits for advancing STEM education through situated 3D simulations, providing entertainment through whole-body interaction, and enhancing physical & cognitive rehabilitation through motivational engagement. We are interested in bringing such experiences into the hands of elementary-school children. In this project we are studying young children's ability to effectively use various types of handheld-AR interfaces.
Isola is a VR experience that takes place in a fantasy world consisted of many floating islands. Special pieces representing forgotten dreams are scattered in the space. The player has to find his lost pieces to become complete again. During the Journey, a special vehicle will be available for navigation and interaction. With the vehicle, the player can sail among the floating islands. He/she will overcome bad weather, throw a ring to attract giant fish, and at the end, combine two broken pieces collected along the way to form a full star.
Lonely Mountain is a virtual reality adaptation of the movie The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. In this VR experience, Lonely Mountain has fallen into the claws of Smaug the Terrible. You will take the role of the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. Your mission is to find and recover the Arkenstone, and unite the dwarf realms once more under the same banner to save Lonley Mountain. The scenario has Bilbo reaches the treasure room and picks up a tool to grab the Arkenstone from the claws of Smaug without waking up Smaug.
Mumerize is an educative music game to help music learners to memorize music intervals and learn the structure of music. This game provides the player with a scene like a platform game where the platforms are created by dividing a melody into music notes. The player should determine the position of the next platform by hearing and selecting an answer of intervals.
For this project, we are working with a AAA gaming studio (Insomniac Games) to investigate how adults with and without disabilities customize their console gaming experiences and their motivations behind these decisions. We are interested in the design and presentation of in-game settings, barriers to accessing these settings, and ways to encourage players to change the necessary settings to improve their experience. This project will follow a human-centered design process through user interviews, surveys, diary studies, and additional methods to be determined.
Theories of Quantum Mechanics(QM) have been central to the philosophical and technological advances in physics and related fields. Some of the most important aspects of these theories are outside the bounds of human experience, predominantly explained and taught drawing on abstract mathematical formulas.
Professional esports athletes compete under tremendous pressure that has significant impacts on their physical, cognitive, emotional, and mental health. However, little is known for how to support this specific kind of demographic, which trends young and where its players often find themselves far from home working in a language they might not be comfortable with. Students in this team study how mobile health tools can mitigate these impacts and empower users through a co-design process with players and the staff that support them.
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CopyCat and PopSign are two games that help deaf children and their parents acquire language skills in American Sign Language. 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and most of those parents never learn enough sign language to teach their children. As short term memory skills are learned from acquiring a language, many deaf children enter school with short term memory of less than 3 items, much less than hearing children of hearing parents or Deaf children of Deaf parents. Our systems address this problem directly.
Psi and Delta is a collaborative classroom videogame that enables students to experience the world of the very small, together.
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An interactive fiction game, looking at the labor dynamics in a clothes factory, one of the first factories to be set up in the U.S.
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Story generation is the problem of automatically selecting a sequence of events that meet a set of criteria and can be told as a story. Story generation is knowledge-intensive; traditional story generators rely on a priori defined domain models about fictional worlds, including characters, places, and actions that can be performed. Manually authoring the domain models is costly and thus not scalable. We present a novel class of story generation system--called an Open Story Generator--that can generate stories about any topic.
The Sonified Fantasy Sports project has been exploring various ways to add sounds to online (web or mobile apps) fantasy sports in an attempt to make a more immersive user experience while also adding to the accessibility of fantasy sports for visually impaired or print disabled users. After identifying information needs and various strategies employed by users (who ranged from beginners to power users) we were able to identify a hierarchy in which to present information about my team and players using sound.
Scholastic esports focus on the development of student ability, interest, and character through extracurricular competitive gaming experiences and community building. Students in this VIP Esports team work closely with educational professionals, the Georgia Department of Education, the Georgia Scholastic Esports Foundation, and the North American Scholastic Esports Federation to research the impacts on K-12 students through scholastic esports participation and the creation of tools for educational professionals that support their scholastic esports programming.
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Compete in an immersive steam punk environment hot-air-balloon race against your arch nemesis using a custom VR controller. The evil nemesis has sabotaged your balloon and stolen your robot, now you must work against the odds to keep your balloon afloat, save your robot, and prove you are the best inventor in Mountaintown! This game makes use of a specialized controller that combines a familiar motion with pressure sensitive pump to provide realtime feedback and a deeper immersive experience.
The StoryCraft Lab conducts research at the intersection of computational craft and narrative as it exists in interactive digital media.
StrangVR Things is a VR prototype that crafts an immersive and engaging experience within the narrative world of Netflix's original series, Stranger Things. The user takes on the role of Eleven and must escape a hostile environment by leveraging her telekinetic powers. Our design aims to allow show viewers to explore the dangers of the Stranger Things world through Eleven's eyes and endow viewers with the same mysterious powers.
“Take Me Home” is a VR experience where the interactor must escape from a post-apocalyptic, underground tunnel. The environment is designed to be a puzzle where the only way out is to manipulate the space using rotational hand gestures. With “Fireflies, Take Me Home”, our research focus is on the creation of impossible spaces in a VR environment. The experience is built for the HTC Vive using Unity.
Our project aims to explore how to create immersive interactions, motivate interactors to engage and enhance interactor's experience in VR narrative with incentives and rewarding system design, possibly using full-body tracking technology. The narrative of our project starts inside a coffin where the interactor will hear MJ's thriller. Moving outside the coffin, he will find MJ zombie dancing with other zombies on the stage for a huge zombie audience. Then MJ zombie will invite him to dance along with the music. When he gets the correct move, audience applaud. We would like to design incent
The Grand Palace is a Chinese history simulation game exploring an educational strategy of representing a complex political system in a specific historical period. In this game, interactors play as an emperor in the imperial age of China, who needs to seek supporters in the court to prepare for war. The simulation represents the bureaucratic structure of the imperial court and the political threats an emperor might face. The goal is to educate the interactors about the strategies an emperor can use to maintain his power.
This project is a narrative video game exploring what are the effective emotional agencies, an experiment on combining traditional Chinese philosophy and contemporary one together, and a biography of my grandmother conveying the unforgettable piece of the history of the new China. In this game, which is the first episode, interactors need to play a role of my grandma in her childhood. They need to collect food, get along with people, and manage their mental health to survive in the cruel world.
A video game adaptation of the Haruki Murakami story built in Unreal Engine.
The goal of this study is to understand how people interact with tangible user interfaces through play with the intent to support exploration, discovery, and learning of visual narratives. We designed the interactive system with the use of tangible blocks as primary interaction mode in mind, which contain various design elements of sequential art (graphic novels), for creating, editing, modifying visual narratives through different configuration and combination of blocks viewed under a device, such as such as a mobile phone in the form of augmented reality.
