EMIIE Lab
Principal Investigator: Magy Seif el-Nasr
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About the lab:
The lab's mission is to explore techniques and tools that enhance enjoyment and engagement within interactive experiences, including games, interactive narratives, virtual worlds, and interactive performances. Lab members engage in multi-disciplinary research integrating research theories and technologies developed in areas, such as psychology, cultural studies, media studies, theatre, film, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, and electrical engineering.
The EMIIE lab is within the HVI lab. It is composed of 7-8 grad students and assistant professor Magy Seif el-Nasr.
Projects:
(a) SIAT XNA Infrastructure project. This project focuses on developing a middle-ware built on top of XNA Game Studio developed by Microsoft. The goal is to develop an infrastructure for game research that allows researchers to plug in and evaluate their own components in a complex integral 3-D environment. The infrastructure includes a middle age type town with 20 characters fully modeled and animated. Characters already have some low level AI to allow them to navigate through the environment.
(b) A Study of Engagement in game play. This project focuses on developing set of techniques for evaluating game play and recognizing game play patterns that are fun and engaging. The project takes into account different audiences and their previous experience as well as culture.
(c) Aboriginal interactive storytelling. This project aims to develop knowledge on interactive storytelling processes used in aboriginal culture and deduce some techniques for embedding such a process within an interactive digital storytelling environment.
(d) Dynamic Lighting for games. The purpose of this project is to develop a lighting design tool that adapts lighting within interactive environments. The tool also adapts the lighting language used in film and theatre to compose a new language for interactive environments that will facilitate the lighting designers workflow.
(e) Games and Learning. This project explores the use of game building as an engaging activity to learn programming and game design.
(f) Believable characters. This project focuses on developing intelligent compelling narrative characters that can adapt as well as present a consistent personality within an interactive environment.
(g) Dance and Ambient Intelligence. In this project, we are interested in exploring the role of ambient intelligence through adaptive lighting, sound, and music in improvisational dance performances.