Adapting models of visual aesthetics for personalized content creation

This paper introduces a search-based approach to personalized content generation with respect to visual aesthetics. The approach is based on a two-step adaptation procedure where (1) the evaluation function that characterizes the content is adjusted to match the visual aesthetics of users and (2) the content itself is optimized based on the personalized evaluation function. To test the efficacy of the approach we design fitness functions based on universal properties of visual perception, inspired by psychological and neurobiological research. Using these visual properties we generate aesthetically pleasing 2D game spaceships via neuroevolutionary constrained optimization and evaluate the impact of the designed visual properties on the generated spaceships. The offline generated spaceships are used as the initial population of an interactive evolution experiment in which players are asked to choose spaceships according to their visual taste: the impact of the various visual properties is adjusted based on player preferences and new content is generated online based on the updated computational model of visual aesthetics of the player. Results are presented which show the potential of the approach in generating content which is based on subjective criteria of visual aesthetics.Thanks to all the participants of the interactive evolution experiement. The research was supported, in part, by the FP7 ICT project SIREN (project no: 258453) and by the Danish Research Agency, Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation project AGameComIn; project number: 274- 09-0083.peer-reviewe

Game AI revisited

More than a decade after the early research efforts on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in computer games and the establishment of a new AI domain the term “game AI” needs to be redefined. Traditionally, the tasks associated with game AI revolved around non player character (NPC) behavior at different levels of control, varying from navigation and pathfinding to decision making. Commercial-standard games developed over the last 15 years and current game productions, however, suggest that the traditional challenges of game AI have been well addressed via the use of sophisticated AI approaches, not necessarily following or inspired by advances in academic practices. The marginal penetration of traditional academic game AI methods in industrial productions has been mainly due to the lack of constructive communication between academia and industry in the early days of academic game AI, and the inability of academic game AI to propose methods that would significantly advance existing development processes or provide scalable solutions to real world problems. Recently, however, there has been a shift of research focus as the current plethora of AI uses in games is breaking the non-player character AI tradition. A number of those alternative AI uses have already shown a significant potential for the design of better games. This paper presents four key game AI research areas that are currently reshaping the research roadmap in the game AI field and evidently put the game AI term under a new perspective. These game AI flagship research areas include the computational modeling of player experience, the procedural generation of content, the mining of player data on massive-scale and the alternative AI research foci for enhancing NPC capabilities.peer-reviewe

Playful AR - Playfulness and augmented reality in a route planning application

This thesis explores implementing playfulness into a route planning application using augmented reality. While AR in itself has been around since the 1960s, the use of it on smartphones is a quite new territory. The potential for AR as an everyday tool grows with the development of technology, and the use of the cameras in smartphones. Because of its newness there are still issues with the user experience and different opinions on how to best utilise it. The preliminary idea for this design concept was of a route planning application with AR, which helps the user map themselves in 3D space. Looking at past and present applications, many of them are games or have a lighthearted way of using AR. Implementing playfulness in design can make the user experience more pleasurable for the user. Adding playfulness as a means of introducing users to a new way of navigating, not only new applications and technology, but in the real world as well. The combining of the AR app and playfulness was achieved in this thesis with the help of the Playful Experience Framework (PLEX). A video prototype was made based on the design concept derived from the PLEX cards. The video prototype was then used in interviews where the design concept was explained. The aim of the interviews was to gauge the overall reaction to this type of application and answer questions such as: who would use it, how would they use it, and how they found the playful experience? The reception of playful aspect of the application played a part in analysing the responses in order to see how to proceed with the concept and whether it was a viable idea or not. The overall opinion of the design concept was positive with many wanting to test it out, which would be the next step in development after new iteration is complete, fixing the issues found in the current one.Denna avhandling utforskar implementationen av lekfullhet i en ruttplaneringsapplikation med hjälp av förstärkt verklighet (augmented reality / AR). Medan AR i sig har funnits sedan 1960-talet är användningen av det i smartmobiler ett helt nytt område. Potentialen för AR som ett vardagsverktyg växer i takt med utvecklingen av teknik och användningen av kamerorna i smartmobiler. Eftersom AR är en ny användarupplevelse, finns det fortfarande problem med den och åsikterna om hur den bäst ska utnyttjas varierar. Den preliminära idén för avhandlingens koncept var en ruttplaneringsapplikation med AR som hjälper användaren orientera sig själv i en 3D-värld. Många nu existerande AR-applikationer är spel eller utnyttjar AR på ett lekfullt sätt vilket kan göra användarupplevelsen mer njutbar för användaren. Lekfullhet kan användas som ett sätt att introducera användare till ett nytt sätt att navigera, inte bara nya applikationer och teknik, utan också i den verkliga världen. I denna avhandling förverkligades kombinationen av ar-appen och lekfullhet med hjälp av ett så kallat “Playful Experience Framework” (PLEX). En videoprototyp gjordes baserat på PLEX kortens koncept. Videoprototypen användes sedan i in-tervjuer där designkonceptet förklarades. Syftet med intervjuerna var att mäta den övergripande reaktionen på denna typ av applikation och svara på frågor som: vem skulle använda den, hur skulle de använda den, och hur den lekfulla upplevelsen upplevdes. För att se hur man skulle kunna fortsätta med konceptet och huruvida det var en genomförbar idé eller inte, var motta-gandet av den lekfulla aspekten av applikationen speciellt viktig i analysen av svaren. Det allmänna mottagandet av konceptet var positiv och många sade sig vilja testa prototypen, vilket skulle vara nästa steg i utvecklingen efter det att en ny iteration är färdig, med korrigeringar av de problem som identifierats i den nuvarande versionen

Occlusion: Creating Disorientation, Fugue, and Apophenia in an Art Game

Occlusion is a procedurally randomized interactive art experience which uses the motifs of repetition, isolation, incongruity and mutability to develop an experience of a Folie àDeux: a madness shared by two. It draws from traditional video game forms, development methods, and tools to situate itself in context with games as well as other forms of interactive digital media. In this way, Occlusion approaches the making of game-like media from the art criticism perspective of Materiality, and the written work accompanying the prototype discusses critical aesthetic concerns for Occlusion both as an art experience borrowing from games and as a text that can be academically understood in relation to other practices of media making. In addition to the produced software artifact and written analysis, this thesis includes primary research in the form of four interviews with artists, authors, game makers and game critics concerning Materiality and dissociative themes in game-like media. The written work first introduces Occlusion in context with other approaches to procedural remixing, Glitch Art, net.art, and analogue and digital collage and décollage, with special attention to recontextualization and apophenia. The experience, visual, and audio design approach of Occlusion is reviewed through a discussion of explicit design choices which define generative space. Development process, release process, post-release distribution, testing, and maintenance are reviewed, and the paper concludes with a description of future work and a post- mortem discussion. Included as appendices are a full specification document, script, and transcripts of all interviews

Management and Visualisation of Non-linear History of Polygonal 3D Models

The research presented in this thesis concerns the problems of maintenance and revision control of large-scale three dimensional (3D) models over the Internet. As the models grow in size and the authoring tools grow in complexity, standard approaches to collaborative asset development become impractical. The prevalent paradigm of sharing files on a file system poses serious risks with regards, but not limited to, ensuring consistency and concurrency of multi-user 3D editing. Although modifications might be tracked manually using naming conventions or automatically in a version control system (VCS), understanding the provenance of a large 3D dataset is hard due to revision metadata not being associated with the underlying scene structures. Some tools and protocols enable seamless synchronisation of file and directory changes in remote locations. However, the existing web-based technologies are not yet fully exploiting the modern design patters for access to and management of alternative shared resources online. Therefore, four distinct but highly interconnected conceptual tools are explored. The first is the organisation of 3D assets within recent document-oriented No Structured Query Language (NoSQL) databases. These "schemaless" databases, unlike their relational counterparts, do not represent data in rigid table structures. Instead, they rely on polymorphic documents composed of key-value pairs that are much better suited to the diverse nature of 3D assets. Hence, a domain-specific non-linear revision control system 3D Repo is built around a NoSQL database to enable asynchronous editing similar to traditional VCSs. The second concept is that of visual 3D differencing and merging. The accompanying 3D Diff tool supports interactive conflict resolution at the level of scene graph nodes that are de facto the delta changes stored in the repository. The third is the utilisation of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for the purposes of 3D data management. The XML3DRepo daemon application exposes the contents of the repository and the version control logic in a Representational State Transfer (REST) style of architecture. At the same time, it manifests the effects of various 3D encoding strategies on the file sizes and download times in modern web browsers. The fourth and final concept is the reverse-engineering of an editing history. Even if the models are being version controlled, the extracted provenance is limited to additions, deletions and modifications. The 3D Timeline tool, therefore, implies a plausible history of common modelling operations such as duplications, transformations, etc. Given a collection of 3D models, it estimates a part-based correspondence and visualises it in a temporal flow. The prototype tools developed as part of the research were evaluated in pilot user studies that suggest they are usable by the end users and well suited to their respective tasks. Together, the results constitute a novel framework that demonstrates the feasibility of a domain-specific 3D version control

Data storing with an external web database for e-learning activities in Second Life

Projecte realitzat mitjançant programa de mobilitat. POLITECNICO DI TORINO. III FACOLTÀ DI INGEGNERIAImplemented an external database in order to save E-Learning gathered information from Second Life, as Second Life does not provide a native way to do it. It involved: - Implementing a script in Second Life (in the SLS scripting language) which collects information and it sends to an external server. - Implementing a server that receives the information from the Second Life script, saves it to a database, and also provides a web application that allows administrators (i.e. professors) to manage information (meetings, activities and locations in which to to these activities) and users (i.e. students) to see this information

Digital modeling of the impact of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake

Toys have played a role in the development of 3D skills for architects. As a continuation of this, games, a subgenre of which are city building games, the father of all is SimCity, a variant of construction management games, underlay a socio-economic model. Outgoing from a general view of the role of toys and games in building the skills of architects, we focus on the modelling of the impact of earthquakes on urban areas. The particular case considered is Lisbon 1755, set into the context of related developments such as l'Aquila 2009 and Bucharest 1977. We examined the 3D modelling of the city, which can be the base for computer games, namely the GIS based, Google Earth and Second Life. For all these modells we filled forms which are provided in the annexes, to see the usability and potential improvements, which will be considered in the model we propose. The later builds a game with a socio-economic component, but both later ones have the social component of crowd sourcing participation. The Second Life concept can be extended with narratives of chance like in board games, to realise the immersion like in a novel in the historic time depicted, organising for example virtual events in the public space framework modelled. Different Levels of Detail are identified as necessary in order to on one side identify the landmarks of the image of the city in the perception of inhabitants and tourists and on the other hand to model populations of buildings for future economic studies, based on a structural mechanics instead of statistical approach. Outgoing from this analysis we propose an own concept to model the impact of the 1755 earthquake on Lisbon. We based our concept on the analysis of the space and time aspects in the memory of the pre-disaster city, and considered 72 landmark buildings which can be symbolically modeled as spaces, based on a 2D to 3D concept. Depending on where they were situated, these have been affected by the earthquake or not. We provide besides the overview of the literature on games for architecture on urbanism purposes also this one on memory. This includes on its side a game, for lessons learned in the identification of the landmarks of the city. Apart of the game, there is a guided tour with timeline and the 3D model in itself. Codes are provided. For the analysis we used different views of the city: eye-level, silhouette (from the river) and aerial. This can be the basis of a future augmented reality application including the 3D model and the photos/ engravings of the time. The socio-economic component will be based on the modeling of material resources necessary to retrofit or reconstruct, for the detailedly considered „pombalino” buildings. But first of all identifying the urban morphology through 3D modeling is serving as a basis for master planning, especially the strategic planning of the minimal urban structure, in both preventive pre-earthquake intervention and post-earthquake reconstruction, as aimed for in the „Lisbon in motion” workshop and planned related ones

Ambiguous worlds: understanding the design of first-person walker games

The ‘walker’ is a burgeoning form of videogame with a growing body of literature primarily discussing how the genre challenges the accepted norms of games. These discussions widely use the derogatory term ‘walking simulator’, which implies its non-game status. What is also clear from these discussions is how these games draw on, but also push back against game design conventions. Walking is the primary means of interaction in walker games, rather than prioritising ‘skill-based’ mechanics. For example, the mechanics of gameplay in walker games are typically minimal, slow and non-violent. The unique design focus of walker games exists within a contested and complicated area of game design literature, yet many players find the exploration and experiences of these game environments to be compelling. This research asks: What gameplay experiences do walkers elicit, and how might designers understand these experiences? What are the game design attributes that engage players to explore 3D walker environments? How can these design attributes be used to design first-person walker games and 3D games more broadly? Drawing upon game design and design research literature, I explore these questions with specific focus on player interaction and level design in walker game world exploration. My research approach consists of three major investigative stages. I conduct a formal analysis of four existing walker games: Dear Esther, Proteus, Gone Home and The Stanley Parable. My analysis reveals four key themes for investigating walker design. These four themes are then applied to the development of my design project, WORLD4, a multi-view exploration game where players explore a 3D layered abstract world. I develop a methodological approach based upon indie gameplay testing to conduct an analysis of WORLD4’s design through a two-stage qualitative player study. Based on these three stages of analysis, I conclude that a particular kind of experience of curiosity emerges, driving player exploration in walker games. My findings indicate that the experience of curiosity is fostered by incorporating ambiguity into the game design, which modifies game world exploration into a more investigative and interpretive activity. I support this conclusion through three design themes to understand the player experience of WORLD4 and six design strategies for fostering ambiguity in the design of exploratory game environments. More generally, I contribute a perspective on game design that emphasises ambiguity in order to create heightened and compelling exploration experiences