While energy conservation in the home is an important part of reducing our ecological footprint most people do not understand or even realize how their energy consumption works and how they can manage it. In-home displays offer the opportunity to help become more aware, but often do not fit into a home’s aesthetics, typically relegated to an unobvious location after the novelty “wears off”. They also provided little opportunity for interaction and learning.

This project centers around what we refer to as “ultra casual” games with the goal of discovering more efficient ways to develop engaging casual video games. The industry partner Victory Square Games has partnered with Microsoft to develop 20 games for the Windows tablet to further expand their Windows 8 app library. The associated internship project seeks to advance the state of game design through the formation and application of new theories for greater user engagement and cognitive analysis, and adapt into an agile game development methodology.

This project centers around what we refer to as “ultra casual” games with the goal of discovering more efficient ways to develop engaging casual video games. The industry partner Victory Square Games has partnered with Microsoft to develop 20 games for the Windows tablet to further expand their Windows 8 app library. The associated internship project seeks to advance the state of game design through the formation and application of new theories for greater user engagement and cognitive analysis, and adapt into an agile game development methodology.

The display industry has witnessed rapid growth, in both volume and diversification. In recent years, this trend is expected to persist with continued consumer demand, for example, a wide range of devices such as MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS map readers, portable DVD players, and electronic books, as well as the ubiquitous mobile phone and laptop computers, are integrated into one display or smart display.

We want to learn about the video game “Get Water!” at the Linden School for Girls in Toronto with students between the ages of 10 – 14, from their perspective. This research will involve their teachers and parents as co-researchers who will be asked to keep a journal for two weeks about anything the girls may say directly about the game, or about global water issues or girls education, or anything the girls may do in relation to the game or water issues, for example research on the internet about water or girls education.

The goal is to investigate the realistic appearance models for complex reflectance properties, modeling reflectance, masking and inter-reflection at many scales. In the end, comparison and basis-space representation will be leveraged to develop an interactive rendering application for pre-visualization and in-game portrayal of complex materials.

This project will involve leveraging existing work completed from a previous MITACS grant, by using statistical modeling and machine learning techniques in order to identify significant player behaviour in terms of the effectiveness of multiple communication/messaging channels.

The objective of this project is to explore the uses of Augmented Reality (AR), a technology that superimposes computer-generated animations, on a mobile user’s view of the real world, in the context of children’s gaming applications. These applications will allow children to experience a game as being directly tied to reality. Specifically, using for example an electronic tablet such as the iPad, children will interact with real world toys through the addition of virtual layers presenting various digital contents such as images or animations.

The objectives of this research project are to deepen understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of engagement in games, especially in the context of multiplayer games. The research will be leveraged by our organization in future research projects and commercial productions.

Video Games require a vast array of different computations to present the desired experience. These computations must be completed consistently to make the software responsive to the user. The industry trend towards many separate processors (multi-core) in the same physical device and the emergence of network based 'cloud' computing have created many opportunities, but also many challenges for the game industry.