From the introduction: "Three dimensional graphics hardware is fast becoming, not merely a staple of computer systems, but an indispensable component. Many operating systems directly use and even require some degree of 3D rendering hardware. Even in the increasingly relevant mobile computing space, 3D graphics hardware is a standard feature of all but the lowest power devices.
Understanding how to make the most of that hardware is a difficult challenge, particularly for someone new to graphics and rendering."
"Smartphone devices are becoming the de facto personal com-
puting platform, rivaling the desktop, as the number of
smartphone users is projected to reach 1.1 billion by 2013.
Unlike the desktop, smartphones have a constrained energy
budget, which is further challenged by increasingly sophisti-
cated applications. Amongst the most popular applications
on smartphone devices are games and virtual environments
that rely on 3D graphics. Due to the computational inten-
sity of geometry and rasterization, as well as the perpetually
illuminated display, these applications are extremely power-
hungry. To prolong the battery life of devices running these
applications, we propose two new energy-aware adaptation
schemes that can be employed in 3D graphics applications:
lighting limitation and textural transformation. Our results
show that we can conserve between 20% and 33% of energy
with acceptable sacrices to a user's visual experience."
abstract: "This work focuses on the design and implementation of an educational game for deployment on the Xbox 360 commercial game console. Video games can be extremely powerful and effective learning tools when deployed with methodical precision. Currently, no learning tools are available for commercial consoles that focus on teaching core concepts in Engineering. This work presents an overall design for an educational game to address Number Systems in the scope of the Electrical and Computer Engineering curricula.
BINX is an educational adventure game designed to address Number Systems and their arithmetic operations in Digital Logic Design, a core course is Electrical and Computer Engineering programs. Object Oriented Design Principles were used in the development of this game. This work presents one sublevel implemented using the XNA framework - a Microsoft Software Development Kit (SDK).The BINX gameplay takes place inside a computer where a malicious virus is threatening the computer's operability. The player has to find the virus and eradicate it by disconnecting the terminals of the graphics processor. The player has the opportunity to practice before taking on the Boss Challenge. In the practice phase, the player practices number conversions without fear of penalties. In the Challenge phase, the player is timed and has to perform the number conversions before the allotted time expires. The combination of practice and challenge provides players with the ability to practice number conversions and, when ready, to take on the challenge task where assessment is conducted to provide the player with the knowledge of how well he/she has performed on the challenge. The number conversion level of BINX was implemented and formally evaluated showing improvement in student scores after using BINX."
Abstract: "The video games industry develops ever more advanced technologies to improve rendering, image quality, ergonomics and user experience of their creations providing very simple to use tools to design new games. In the molecular sciences, only a small number of experts with specialized know-how are able to design interactive visualization applications, typically static computer programs that cannot easily be modified. Are there lessons to be learned from video games? Could their technology help us explore new molecular graphics ideas and render graphics developments accessible to non-specialists? This approach points to an extension of open computer programs, not only providing access to the source code, but also delivering an easily modifiable and extensible scientific research tool. In this work, we will explore these questions using the Unity3D game engine to develop and prototype a biological network and molecular visualization application for subsequent use in research or education. We have compared several routines to represent spheres and links between them, using either built-in Unity3D features or our own implementation. These developments resulted in a stand-alone viewer capable of displaying molecular structures, surfaces, animated electrostatic field lines and biological networks with powerful, artistic and illustrative rendering methods. We consider this work as a proof of principle demonstrating that the functionalities of classical viewers and more advanced novel features could be implemented in substantially less time and with less development effort. Our prototype is easily modifiable and extensible and may serve others as starting point and platform for their developments. A webserver example, standalone versions for MacOS X, Linux and Windows, source code, screen shots, videos and documentation are available at the address: http://unitymol.sourceforge.net/."
"Automated lm editing involves the generation of the position,
orientation, motion and selection of virtual cameras
in interactive 3D graphics applications. There is a pressing
demand for techniques to assist and automate the control of
virtual cameras in the computer games industry where the
rapid development of personal computers and high performance
consoles has led to substantial improvements in the
visual delity of games. The goal of this survey is to characterize
the spectrum of applications that require automated
lm editing, present a summary of state-of-the-art models
and techniques, and identify both promising avenues and
hot topics for future research"
Abstract: "We present a method for simulating the melting
and owing of material in burning objects fast
enough to be of use in video games where most
of the graphical and computational resources are
needed elsewhere. The standard practice of us-
ing particle engines or uid dynamics for melting
are far too costly for use in this environment. We
demonstrate that our method, which is based on
systematic polygonal expanding and folding, uses
only a fraction of the computational power avail-
able by implementing the computation on a very
modest GPU using CUDA"
"Objects in 3D games are typically shell models, a
polygon mesh representing the shell or skin of the
object. While emulation of the behaviour of shell
models under combustion is sucient for many
game applications and is fairly well studied, solid
objects do in fact burn rather dierently than shell
objects. We show how to manipulate shell models
so that they appear to burn as solid models. Since
our burning objects will be only a small part of a
video game, computation speed is of the essence.
We demonstrate that our method uses only a fraction
of the computational power available by implementing
the computation on a modest GPU using
CUDA."
Abstract: "D video games are getting popular in the world with the availability of advanced graphic cards, high
processing p
ower computers, high speed internet and smart sensing devices ranging from general mouse
to Microsoft Kinect. OpenGL is a popular graphics processing framework and it is being used by many
famous 3D video game design software as the back end framework. In
this paper we present our
experience with OpenGL based C++ implementation of a 3D first person shooting game. 3D
environment building, navigating, character animation, lighting, sound and shooting is described.
Specially OpenGL based concepts are discussed
for clear understanding of the concepts."
Abstract: "Cloud gaming now makes any computer game
playable on a thin client without the previous worries and
frustrations about the hardware requirements. It frees players
from the need to frequently upgrade their computers as they
can now play games that are hosted on remote servers with a
broadband Internet connection and a thin client. However, cloud
games are intrinsically more susceptible to latency than online
games because game graphics are rendered on cloud servers and
thin clients do not possess game state information that is required
by delay compensation techniques.
In this paper, we investigate how the response latency in cloud
gaming would affect users' experience and how the impact of
latency on players' experience varies among different games. We
show that not all games are equally friendly to cloud gaming. That
is, the same degree of latency may have very different impacts on
a game's quality of experience depending on the game's real-time
strictness. We thus develop a model that can predict a game's
real-time strictness based on the rate of players' inputs and the
game screen dynamics. The model can be used to simultaneously
enhance players' gaming and optimize the operation
cost of data centers."
Abstract: "Abstract-In computer games and simulations, content is often
rather static and rigid. As a result, its prescripted nature can lead
to predictable and impersonal gameplay, while alienating unconventional
players. Adaptivity in games has therefore been recently
proposed to overcome these shortcomings and make games more
challenging and appealing. In this paper, we survey present research
on game adaptivity, identifying, and discussing the main
challenges, and pointing out some of the most promising directions
ahead.We first survey the purposes of adaptivity, as the principles
that could steer an adaptation and generation engine. From this
perspective, we proceed to thoroughly discuss adaptivity's targets
and methods. Current advances and successes in this emerging
field point to many yet unexplored research opportunities. Among
them, we discuss the use of gameplay expectations, learning preferences,
and assessment data in the integrated adaptation of game
worlds, scenarios, and quests. We conclude that, among other
methods, procedural content generation and semantic modeling
can powerfully combine to create offline customized content and
online adjustments to game worlds, scenarios, and quests. These
and other promising methods, deserving ample research efforts,
can therefore, be expected to significantly contribute towards
making games and simulations even more unpredictable, effective,
and fun."
"A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player's own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience."
Abstract: "ideo games and other applications using off
-
the
-
shelf tracking
devices often take a simple approach to gesture and pose
recognition:
a recognized gesture is always mapped to the same
action
. This approach
basically turns a gesture into a binary button
pre
ss and
misses much of the nuance implicit in natural gestures.
In this paper we explore
,
in a game design setting
,
the use of
continuous 3D gesture sequences where
in
attributes of individual
gestures, such as speed, direction,
etc., combine to influence th
e
r
esult of the sequence as a whole
.
We present Pixelbending, a
game demo
built using the Microsoft Kinect and Unreal
Developers Kit (UDK)
in which the player performs Tai Chi
inspired movements to control water. Designed with the goal
of
creating a fun an
d engaging 3D game experience built
on a
nuanced gesture set, the demo was well received by many players
of different ages and sizes. Through the development process we
encountered challenges to working with off
-
the
-
shelf devices."
Abstract: "As computational capability continues to increase, the tools
available to designers of digital games have become more robust, allowing
high fidelity graphics and sound to become common, and resulting
in a market saturated with kinetic-based games. However, consumers
and educators are eschewing such games for more complex and
immersive stories, the creation of which has proven a difficult mountain
for designers to climb. A central reason is that story-immersive
games rely on dialogue between the player character (PC) and nonplayer
characters (NPCs), the writing and coding of which is time consuming
and inefficient. This paper documents the author's experiences
with complex, branching dialogue systems, and examines the possibility
of system automation through natural language processing (NLP)."
"Physics engines have created a whole new source of emergence
and fun for digital games. Water simulation could add
another similar emergent interaction element, but it is currently
only rarely used as a part of gameplay. The reasons
for this are analysed and different water simulation methods
are compared, focusing on actual game usage. Based
on this, we suggest using the extremely simple but fast pipe
model. The simplicity of the underlying simulation can be
masked in many ways using modern shader effects and other
tricks. An example of the pipe method in action is given and
compared to more sophisticated fluid solvers."
"We argue that the development of innovative artificial intelligence (AI) systems plays a crucial role in the exploration of currently unreachable spaces. To aid in exploration, we suggest a practice called AI-based game design, an iterative design process that deeply integrates the affordances of an AI system within the context of game design."