TU Delft Graphics News

Read more here, here and here, about three serious gaming student projects, implemented during our recent course on Building Serious Games.

At regular intervals, we will post updates concerning recent master thesis topics and outcomes.

We’ll begin with a description of the work done by Marnix Kraus, MSc. who completed his Master Thesis in the field of active multi-camera navigation in video surveillance systems, supervised by Gerwin de Haan. He designed and evaluated a prototype system for this purpose. His findings indicate that the presented system can enhance operator performance in surveillance control rooms that monitor vast and complex areas. The full thesis can be downloaded here. More information on research related to this topic can be found on the VRLAB project website.

In the game technology department, Rick de Ridder, MSc. worked on simulating urban area development for semantic game worlds for his Master Thesis. This work was supervised by Tim Tutenel and Rafael Bidarra. In his work, he expands a semantic world-generation prototype by introducing factors like resources, events and neighboring settlements in the generation process. It extends current techniques by adding more history and meaning to the procedurally generated cities. The full thesis can be found here and additional information is available on the related Game Technology project website.

Anne van Ee, Msc. developed new interaction schemes for the touch-based organization of patent collections in her thesis work. The thesis was supervised by Gerwin de Haan and it was carried out in co-operation with the European Patent Office. Anne based her work on earlier co-operative work with the European Patent Office and improved the organization system by introducing the Local Affine Multidimensional Projection (LAMP) technique to help the user while searching for patents. If you’re interested in this work, you can check out the full thesis here.

Renata Raidou. MSc. completed her thesis in the field of medical visualization as a Biomedical Engineer. In her work she successfully researched the planning and guidance of minimally invasive cement injection to combat the effects of aseptic loosening that occur after total hip replacement surgery. This work was supervised by Francois Malan and Charl P. Botha. Renata developed an integrated system for planning and guiding minimally invasive refixation. The thesis proposes new approaches to combine CT and fluoroscopy in pre-operative planning. She conducted an extensive review with domain experts to evaluate the system. Her full thesis can be found here.

On the 17^th December, Tim Tutenel will defend his PhD thesis: Semantic Game Worlds. The defense is open for the public and guests are therefore invited to attend. Before the actual defense, Tim will give a short introduction to the subject of his thesis (in Dutch), beginning at 12:00. After that, the defense (in English) will start at 12:30.

Committee: Rector Magnificus (TU Delft), Prof. dr. ir. F.W. Jansen (TU Delft), Dr. ir. R. Bidarra (TU Delft), Prof. dr. C.M. Jonker (TU Delft), Prof. dr. K. Coninx(Universiteit Hasselt), Prof. dr. J. Whitehead (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA), Dr. I.S. Mayer (TU Delft) and Dr. F.P.M. Dignum (Universiteit Utrecht).

Date and time: 17 December 2012, 12:30

Location: Senaatszaal (Aula)

Abstract:

The visual quality of game worlds increased massively in the last three decades. However, the closer game worlds depict reality, the more noticeable it is for gamers when objects do not behave accordingly. An important problem is that the data of a game world is often scattered across different components of the game engine. What lacks is a common semantic representation that can act as the glue between these components.

In this thesis we define semantic game worlds as game worlds that are populated with objects enriched with semantics. They offer game programmers a consistent representation that can be shared by game engine components. Moreover, this representation offers designers a way to moderate conflicts between procedural content generation techniques and it enables them to specify object behavior in a generic manner.

Our colleague, Ricardo Lopes, was interviewed for this month’s TU Delta in their recurring segment halfway (about PhD students halfway in their project).

You can read the article here: http://delta.tudelft.nl/article/making-games-exciting/24438 and learn how to make games more exciting.

On Wednesday, November 30, 2011, Ruben Smelik successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. Dr. Ir. Smelik received his diploma for his research work on A Declarative Approach to Procedural Generation of Virtual Worlds.

Some of this semester’s student projects on our course in Building Serious Games (IN4302TU) have been gathering some attention on the media.

News items on Clash of the Penguins and Teeth Defender can be found on Medgadget, Metro, TU Delta and The Wall Street Journal.

SketchaWorld, born out of the Game Technology PhD thesis of Ruben Smelik, is one of the 24 finalists of the Delft Innovation Award 2011.

Take a look at it here. And don’t forget to cast your vote here.

On a related topic, Ruben’s defense will be happening soon.

On the 30^th November, Ruben Smelik will defend his PhD thesis: A Declarative Approach to Procedural Generation of Virtual Worlds.

The defence is open for the public and readers are therefore invited to attend the first ever Game Technology PhD defence from the TU Delft Graphics group. More details can be found here.

Committee: Rector Magnificus (TU Delft), Prof. dr. ir. F.W. Jansen (TU Delft), Dr. ir. R. Bidarra (TU Delft), Prof. dr. A. van Deursen (TU Delft), Prof. dr. ir. A. Verbraeck (TU Delft), Prof. dr. R.C. Veltkamp (Universiteit Utrecht), Dr. B. Benes (Purdue University, USA) and Dr. ir. J.K. de Kraker (TNO).

Date and time: 30 November 2011, 10:00

Location: Senaatszaal (Aula)

A new MSc project on Adaptive Game World Interactions is available. Interested students can have a look at it, in the Game Technology page.

We have recently received acceptance confirmation for two new conference publications.

A semantic generation framework for enabling adaptive game worlds will appear in the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment technology. A Declarative Instructor-centered Approach to Modeling Synthetic Environments will appear in the proceedings of the I/ITSEC 2011 Conference.

Hope to see you in Lisbon or Orlando!