Believable Characters
In this research project, I focus on developing a believable articulate 3D character that has the ability to display both personality and emotion. My approach is unique in that I use acting, dance, and screenwriting theories as well as psychology models as base models for the underlying system. This project began with my master’s work on believable agents (1998) and is still on-going. The work has also received best student paper award at the Autonomous Agents Conference. We are currently expanding this work and focusing on creating and evaluating a tool for believable characters with personality
Research Goals
Interactive 3D environments, such as the ones we currently see in video games, are becoming very important for their use in education, training, and entertainment. This area is new; however, it is gaining popularity very fast. Many researchers and agencies are recognizing the importance of interactive 3D environments in education, therapy, and training. Developing such interactive experiences involve research and training in many disciplines, including the computational: computer graphics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), engine programming, and optimization algorithms and techniques, the performative: performance arts, film, cinematography, visual design, and audio design, the psychological: psychology of perception, psychology of entertainment, and cognitive science, and design: visual composition, game design, and architectural design. My work is in the intersection of these disciplines. It is focused on enhancing the engagement opportunities through consideration of performative, psychological, and computational techniques.
Below I highlight some of the projects we are involved in. For more about our rojects please see EMIIE Lab site.
Interactive Dynamic Expressive Lighting Design
Lighting design is an important element of the design of any interactive 3D environment. Game lighting designers, for example, configure lighting to evoke moods and emotions, attract attention to particular objects, illuminate surroundings, display time of day and period, and create an atmosphere.
In this work, I aim to explore the use of lighting as a design element within game level composition. We look at the way lighting can shape and change the gameplay experience. We also look into the use of dynamic lighting to facilitate and enhance the gameplay experience.
Assassin's Creed Study
Assassin’s Creed is a francise developed at Ubisoft. Participants can do many things within the game, from achieving different missions, spending time navigating the beautifully constructed environments situated in different worlds (e.g., Italy in 1400s or Demascus 1090s). In this research, we aim to perform some behavioral analysis on video coded sessions and relating this analysis to personality and culture as well as gaming experience. We are collaborating with Alessandro Canossa, IT University Copenhagen, and Simon Neidenthal, Malmo University. We collected data on users playing the game within different countries, including Mexico, Canada, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and India.
Interactive Drama
Interactive narratives have been used in a variety of applications, including video games, educational games, and training simulations. Increasing engagement of such environments is an important problem, because it impacts entertainment, motivation, and presence. In this research direction, I have developed a new interactive narrative architecture using artificial intelligence techniques as well as acting and storytelling theories. Specifically, I designed the architecture using a set of dramatic techniques that I formulated based on several years of training in screenwriting, directing, and acting. The contribution of this work is twofold: (1) the adaptation of several performance arts and storytelling techniques for use in interactive narratives, and (2) a computational representation of these techniques in an interactive narrative system.
Developing Methods for Evaluating Games
Evaluating Games is becoming an important area of research.
All the methods developed for HCI can be adapted to study Games. However, unlike software, games are built for engagement
and entertainment. Thus, evaluation methods need to be adapted and revised to study the engagement value of a game given
the target audience. In this direction, we have collaborated and are currently collaborating with:
(1) Bardel Entertainment to develop cooperative game performance metrics to evaluate cooperative games and design lessons to
help build better cooperative games.
(2) Relic Entertainment and Pixel Ante to develop methods telemetry, data mining and visualization of large behavioral data.
(3) Electronic Arts to develop triangulation methods for evaluating sports games using eye tracking,
physiological measures, and telemetry data.
Games and Education
One particular direction I am focusing on is in engaging middle and high-school female students in building games as an effort to increase their self-efficacy through an environment, where they acquire programming and technical skills as well as artistic and design skills, including storytelling, game design, sketching, and critiquing. We began this work at Penn State in 2004, but currently the workshops are scheduled to be delivered all around the world, including Mexico, US, Canada, India, Pakistan, and Iran. We are using qualitative and quantitative methods to collect information concerning what students learn, their engagement level, their self efficacy before and after, their background and family’s background, and their skill levels coming into the class. The website for this initiative can be seen at Game Dev Camp
Current Student Supervision
Beth Elizabeth Lameman, PhD Candidate
Topic: Process of Oral storytelling within First Nation Culture
David Milam, PhD Candidate
Topic: User Experience within Virtual vs. Real World Environments
Dinara Maura, PhD Student
Topic: navigation and video games
Michael Nixon, PhD Student
Topic: Believable Characters
Andrea Bonanno, PhD Student
Topic: Adaptive Affective Games
Natalie Funk, PhD Student
Topic: Social Health Games
Terry Lavender, PhD Student
Topic: Immersive games and behavior change
Maha Al-Saati, PhD Candidate (Co-supervised with Rob Woodbury)
Topic: Cinematic Patterns for Architecture Animation
Bardia Aghabeigi, Master's (expected Spring 2011)
Title: Understanding and Evaluating Cooperative Video Games
Pooya Amini, Master's (expected Spring 2011)
Title: Privacy in Location based games
Andre Gagne, Master's (expected Summer 2011)
Title: Visualization and game telemetry
Past Students
Joseph Zupko, PhD (received Spring 2009)
Title: System for Automated Interactive Lighting (SAIL)
Priya Almedia, Master's (received Summer 2005)
Title: Identifying low-level visual patterns that stimulate emotions and moods in movies and video games
Michael Nixon, Master's (received Summer 2009)
Title: Enhancing Believability: Evaluating The Application of Delsarte's Aesthetics System to the Design of Virtual Humans
Wendy Foster, Master's (received Spring 2010)
Title: Modeling Girls' Activities, Making IT Relevant: An Exploratory Approach to Promoting
Technology Fluency through Non-formal Learning Designe
Mona Erfani, Master's (received Fall 2010)
Title: The Effect of Previous Gaming Experience on Game Play Performance
Geoffery MacGill, Bsc Penn State University, IST, Spring 2005
Title: Path Planning Middleware for interactive entertainment
Sheri Kayam, BSc. Penn State University, IST, Fall 2006
Topic: Information Gallery utilizing 3D environments for the information analysis domain
Elizabeth Chung, BSc. Penn State University, Computer Science, Fall 200
Topic: Esports
Alex Lemoir, BSc SFU, Computer Science
