Academic literature on the topic '190202 Computer Gaming and Animation'

Abstract Ian Hughes CITP MBCS, Senior Analyst loT at 451 Research and Chair of the BCS Animation and Games SG, takes us on a journey inside the humble desktop PC of the past to explain its potential for an even brighter future.

Machinima is a computer imaging technology typically used in games and animation. It prints all movie cast properties into a virtual environment by means of a camera positioning. Since cinematography is complementary to Machinima, it is possible to simulate a director’s style via various camera placements in this environment. In a gaming application, the director’s style is one of the most impressive cinematic factors, where a whole different gaming experience can be obtained using different styles applied to the same scene. This paper describes a system capable of automatically profile a director’s style using fuzzy logic. We employed 19 output variables and 15 other calculated variables from the animation extraction data to profile two different directors’ styles from five scenes. Area plots and histograms were generated, and, by analyzing the histograms, different director’s styles could be subsequently classified.

Abstract: In this paper, the pathfinding algorithm has been implemented using Unity 3D. Unity-3D is a game engine that provides a 3D environment to statistically incorporate various multimedia data into one platform. It was developed by Unity Technology in the year 2005 and has become one of the most popular platforms for developing 2D and 3D games. The gaming environment provides several elements such as the PhysX physics engine, animation system, terrain editor, etc. Pathfinding is a dynamic process in which the plotting of the shortest path or route between two points is being determined by a computer application. Algorithms are defined as the steps required for completing a particular objective or a task.

This article presents a case of collaborative pedagogy of digital humanities involving a virtual version of historic Salem, North Carolina. “Hidden Town in 3D” is a partnership between Middle Tennessee State University’s Public History, Animation, and Aerospace programs, and Old Salem Museums and Gardens. The object of Hidden Town in 3D is to use digital technologies to recover and represent the stories of the African Americans of Salem. The anticipated outputs for this project are an augmented reality application that can be used on-site at Old Salem, allowing visitors to see slave dwellings where they once stood and a virtual tour using gaming technology of the entire town in the year 1860 with African-American stories and homes reintegrated. Along with enhancing the museum’s visitor experience, these outputs enhance the educational experiences of undergraduate and graduate students through interdisciplinary, project-based learning. Thus, the technical work of modeling, animating, and augmented reality benefits teaching, historical scholarship, and museum offerings.

This article is one of the first to consider the digital phenomenon of computer-generated imagery (CGI) pornography, a highly significant site of convergence that combines the technologies, cultures and aesthetics of digital animation, video games and pornographic film. As much of this controversial new content is produced through the hacking of licensed video game franchises, CGI pornography typifies the democratic possibilities of the digital economy. However, this bizarre digital subculture exemplifies too the tension between ludic and labour-intensive digital practises: its production is embedded simultaneously in the anti-productive play of gaming, hacking and pornography, and in the intensive, neo-liberal labour practises associated with free labour and the video game industry. This article explores CGI porn as a specific site of convergence that fundamentally alters the aesthetics and function of digital pornography and relatedly the libidinal subject that is interpolated in this crucial aspect of digital culture. The filmic genre of pornography has a long tradition of producing affective engagement through vicarious access to the material body; its evocations of veracious materiality and presence are only amplified in a digital culture of virtuality and dematerialization. This article analyses how the technological construction of CGI porn is foregrounded in its images and films, highlighting the codes and patterns of the genre and blending them with a stark revelation of the restrictions and capabilities of CGI technology. The article explores how multiple instances of hypermediacy and hypersignification in CGI porn expose and affectively engage with the fact of convergence itself: that is, revealing technological capacities and limitations of digital animation and eroticizing its interpenetration with the films’ diegeses, aesthetics and representations of movement become the central function of this new cultural output. The libidinal focus of this type of digital pornography fundamentally shifts, then, away from the human body and the attempt to gain vicarious imagistic access to it through digital technologies. Instead, the labour of the animator, and the coding and characters they borrow from video game designs, become the libidinal focus of computer-generated pornography. As this new digital phenomenon uncovers and eroticizes the workings of CGI, so it dismantles the veracity and materiality promised by ‘real body’ digital pornography: CGI porn’s stark foregrounding of its technological constructedness clarifies the artificiality of its ‘real body’ counterpart. This article posits, then, an important new site of convergence. Pornography is a central node in the culture, politics and economics of digital technology, and the ways in which its convergence with CGI practises and video game culture has produced not just an entirely new digital phenomenon, but has fundamentally altered digital pornography's conception of the desirous subject and the material body, are crucial.

A Proposition of Mobile Fractal Image DecompressionMultimedia are becoming one of the most important elements of the user interface with regard to the acceptance of modern mobile devices. The multimodal content that is delivered and available for a wide range of mobile telephony terminals is indispensable to bind users to a system and its services. Currently available mobile devices are equipped with multimedia capabilities and decent processing power and storage area. The most crucial factors are then the bandwidth and costs of media transfer. This is particularly visible in mobile gaming, where textures represent the bulk of binary data to be acquired from the content provider. Image textures have traditionally added visual realism to computer graphics. The realism increases with the resolution of textures. This represents a challenge to the limited bandwidth of mobile-oriented systems. The challenge is even more obvious in mobile gaming, where single image depicts a collection of shots or animation cycles for sprites and a backdrop scenery. In order to increase the efficiency of image and image texture transfer, a fractal based compression scheme is proposed. The main idea is to use an asymmetric server-client architecture. The resource demanding compression process is performed on the server side while the client part decompresses highly packed image data. The method offers a very high compression ratio for pictures representing image textures for natural scenes. It aims to minimize the transmission bandwidth that should speed up the downloading process and minimize the cost and time of data transfer. The paper focuses on the implementation of fractal decompression schemes suitable for most mobile devices, and opens a discussion on fractal image models for limited resource applications.

The Digital Age has only just begun to change how we play, learn and work. In the 21st century technology knows no bounds smart devices such as tablets and phones are entering our everyday lives and are available at affordable prices, have great functionality and offer superior performance. We live in the Internet of Things era where digitization is the integration of digital technologies into everyday life.During this era of fast paced progression the education system must also adapt, develop and evolve itself in order to facilitate the new technological advancements and with it so must the limits of traditional learning be pushed to new heights. Digitalization is one such tool which will help us to transform the old paper educational system into a digital paperless one.Digital education involves the following main advantages: Online courses: Developed by experts in their fields and providing students with lessons which are accessible in real-time; Online exams: Making the examination process convenient for both teachers and students; Interactive content: Students are granted access to an interactive interface which lets them review multimedia content such as videos, presentation and hyperlinks; Animation: The visualization of content, presents the concept in a simplified way with the help of animation; Communication: Students and Teachers are connected in virtual classroom /chat, blog, platform/ designed to provide immediate feedback.Digital education requires a new classroom model to make learning difficult subject matter more exciting and interactive. “Gamification” in education increases motivation through engagement and offers many possible benefits including the following: students taking ownership over their creations; a more relaxed atmosphere which in turn facilitates a more fun and focused environment; the progress is visible through indicators; students often feel more comfortable in a gaming environment.In the following article we are going to present the integration of the core principles of gaming using different development platforms (Scratch / Game Maker / VBA in PowerPoint) and share the results which we achieved when we used this method to train our students grades 5 through 7 in a "gamified" classroom for the most popular international computer science and mathematics competition BEAVER.

Inverse kinematics (IK) has been extensively applied in the areas of robotics, computer animation, ergonomics, and gaming. Typically, IK determines the joint configurations of a robot model and achieves a desired end-effector position in robotics. Since forward and backward teaching inverse kinematics (FABRIK) is a forward and backward iterative method that finds updated joint positions by locating a point on a line instead of using angle rotations or matrices, it has the advantages of fast convergence, low computational cost, and visualizing realistic poses. However, the manipulators usually work in a complex environment. So, the kinematic chains are easy to produce the interference with their surrounding scenarios. To resolve the above mentioned problem, a two-step obstacle avoidance technology is proposed to extend the basic FABRIK in this study. The first step is a heuristic method that locates the updated linkage bar, the root joint, and the target position in a line, so that the interference can be eliminated in most cases. In the second step, multiple random rotation strategies are adopted to eliminate the interference that has not been eliminated in the first step. Experimental results have shown that the extending FABRIK has the obstacle avoidance ability.

This article discusses the main ways of using neural networks and machine learning methods of various types in computer games. Machine learning and neural networks are hot topics in many technology fields. One of them is the creation of computer games, where new tools are used to make games more interesting. Remastered and modified games with neural networks have become a new trend. One of the most popular ways to implement artificial intelligence is neural networks. They are used in everything from medicine to the entertainment industry. But one of the most promising areas for their development is games. The game world is an ideal platform for testing artificial intelligence without the danger of harming nature or people. Making bots more complex is just a small part of what neural networks can do. They are also actively used in game development, and in some areas they already make people feel uncomfortable. Research is ongoing on color and light correction, real-time character animation and behavior control. The main types of neural networks that can learn such functions are considered. Neural networks learn (and self-learn) very quickly. The more primitive the task, the faster the person will become unnecessary. This is already noticeable in the gaming industry, but will soon spread to other areas of life, because games are just a convenient platform for experimenting with artificial intelligence before its implementation in real life. The main problem faced by scientists is that it is difficult for neural networks to copy the mechanics of the game. There are some achievements in this direction, but research continues. Therefore, in the future, real specialists will be required for the development of games for a long time, although AI is already coping with some tasks.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind is a unique interactive 360° video experience of the Mar Menor that manifests the Anthropocene effects on the landscape as augmented, surreal and metaphysical interpretations of the artist’s experiences, during their residency and available secondary scientific data of the Mar Menor ecosystem. Through environmental, social, economic and cultural observations and encounters the team developed an immersive 360° environment that incorporates video and audio recordings with augmented, imaginary and predicted realities transformed from scientific data in obscure and profound guises. This 360° telematic installation incorporating live audience interaction within the original 360° video experience was exhibited at the Centro Cultural Puertas de Castilla in Murcia in May 2019. This collaborative project was developed following a ten-day residency on the Mar Menor, a 170 km² saltwater lagoon on the south-east coast of Spain in September 2018, where the majority of the primary research took place by gathering 360° video material from observations, experiences and interviews. The project has been developed by a team of three UK artists, each bringing specialist experience and knowledge of 360° video to undertake the research and create a unique understanding and manifestation of the changing ecosystem of the Mar Menor. This collaborative project includes and combines Paul Sermon’s co-located telematic experiences in 360° live video environments, Charlotte Gould’s immersive 360° animated augmented reality and Jeremiah Ambrose’s gaze-controlled navigation through 360° video narratives. This practice-based team of artists undertook this research using a range of video and gaming software and advanced hardware devices, including Insta360 Pro 8K video cameras and Oculus Rift head-mounted-displays in conjunction with live video switchers. This has produced a range of ultra HD 360° outputs involving stereo 8K and real-time 4K environments with augmented live 360° video and animation sequences through live chroma-keying effects.

The rise of the mobile Internet enables the creation of applications that provide new and easier ways for people to organise themselves, raise issues, take action and interact with their city. However, a lack of motivation or knowledge often prevents many citizens from regularly contributing to the common good. Therefore, this thesis presents DoGood, a smartphone app, that aims at motivating citizens to carry out civic activities. The thesis asks what kinds of activities citizens consider to be civic and to what extent gamification can motivate users in this context. The DoGood app uses gamified elements to encourage citizens to submit and promote their civic activities as well as to join the activities of others. Gamification is sometimes criticized for simply adding a limited number of game elements, such as leaderboards, on top of an existing experience. However, in the case of the DoGood app, the process of game design was an integral part of the development, and the gamified elements target the user’s intrinsic motivations instead of providing them with an external reward. DoGood was implemented as hybrid mobile app and deployed to citizens of Brisbane in a five weeks long user study. The app successfully motivated most of its users to do more civic activities and its gamified elements were well received. Based on the results of the user study, civic activities can be defined as activities that give citizens the opportunity to become involved and improve life in their local community.

This thesis is concerned with creating and evaluating interactive art systems that facilitate emergent participant experiences. For the purposes of this research, interactive art is the computer based arts involving physical participation from the audience, while emergence is when a new form or concept appears that was not directly implied by the context from which it arose. This emergent ‘whole’ is more than a simple sum of its parts. The research aims to develop understanding of the nature of emergent experiences that might arise during participant interaction with interactive art systems. It also aims to understand the design issues surrounding the creation of these systems. The approach used is Practice-based, integrating practice, evaluation and theoretical research. Practice used methods from Reflection-in-action and Iterative design to create two interactive art systems: Glass Pond and +-now. Creation of +-now resulted in a novel method for instantiating emergent shapes. Both art works were also evaluated in exploratory studies. In addition, a main study with 30 participants was conducted on participant interaction with +-now. These sessions were video recorded and participants were interviewed about their experience. Recordings were transcribed and analysed using Grounded theory methods. Emergent participant experiences were identified and classified using a taxonomy of emergence in interactive art. This taxonomy draws on theoretical research. The outcomes of this Practice-based research are summarised as follows. Two interactive art systems, where the second work clearly facilitates emergent interaction, were created. Their creation involved the development of a novel method for instantiating emergent shapes and it informed aesthetic and design issues surrounding interactive art systems for emergence. A taxonomy of emergence in interactive art was also created. Other outcomes are the evaluation findings about participant experiences, including different types of emergence experienced and the coding schemes produced during data analysis.

Previous research has shown that student-teacher interaction is very important in motivating students to learn a second language. However, it is unclear whether facial expression, which is one of the most important portions of interaction, affects in-game language learning motivation or not. The purpose of this study is to find out the evidence demonstrating the facial expressions of the other party, in this case, virtual characters in game, will or will not influence the learning motivation of Japanese L2 students. The researchers of this study developed four versions of a 3D animated Japanese role-playing game. Each version of the game represents one facial expression that is neutral, happy, sad or angry. The entire research consists of two experiments: a validation study and a motivation study. After validating all the facial expressions of five main characters in the game, eighty-four college students from 200/300 level Japanese courses joined in the motivation study voluntarily. They played a version of the game assigned randomly to them and then did a post-questionnaire. Conclusions were drawn based on the survey results. The findings of this research suggested that virtual characters’ facial expressions in game had no significant effect on participants’ learning motivation. However, significance was found in years of learning Japanese and gender. Meanwhile, it was found facial expression and years of learning Japanese had an interactive effect on the variable immersion into game.

With the interactivity and immersion of players into video games, rising development costs, and heightened expectations from AAA developers video games need to make sure they hit their target market more than ever. This is something that is less extreme in the educational game development space; but ultimately true with limited grant funding, limited development time within a student developer’s schedule, and how rapidly a recently leased student content creator will need to learn the space and needs of the client. When a student is brought on late into a development cycle, it can become troublesome when they are required to meet new developing features on a changing project. This paper looks over how one team approached this issue, with a focus on meeting the needs of a group of American high school teachers. Within this paper, the focus is how they tackled the issue, and how the teachers reacted to the end prototype, with some insight into the older prototypes of the project. Throughout it they had reinforced the ideas that communication, data validity, and set contract goals are important identifiers for project success. Teachers looking at video games care more about the data being valid and clearly communicated more than if a game is fun or laden with features and mini-games.

Achieving a state of balance is essential when developing a video game (Schell, 2019, “Game Mechanics Must Be in Balance,” para. 1). Despite this, game balancing is frequently overlooked in game development curricula (Schreiber, 2016, 00:30). This research describes the development and pilot study of a framework that junior game designers can utilize to gain valuable skills in the area of game balance. The framework produced by this research provides users with the ability to tune weapon parameters and see the effects these changes have on a first-person shooter deathmatch game in real time. Participants in the study utilized the framework to achieve three pacing and balance goals. Data regarding the weapon parameters selected by participants and information about the participants’ usage of the framework is described in detail. This study serves as the groundwork for future research focused on finding a method for teaching junior game designers about game balance.

Terrain generation is a convoluted and a popular topic in the VFX industry. Whether you are part of the film/TV or gaming industry, a terrain, is a highly nuanced feature that is usually present. Regardless of walking on a desert like terrain in the film, Blade Runner 2049 or fighting on different planets like in Avatar, 3D terrains is a major part of any digital media. The purpose of this thesis is about developing a workflow for large-scale terrains using complex data sets and utilizing this workflow to maintain a balance between the procedural content and the artistic input made especially for smaller companies which cannot afford an enhanced pipeline to deal with major technical complications. The workflow consists of two major elements, development of the tool used to optimize the workflow and the recording and maintaining of the efficiency in comparison to the older workflow.

My research findings indicate that despite the increase in overall computational abilities, one of the many issues that are still present is generating a highly advanced terrain with the added benefits of the artists and users’ creative variations. Reducing the overall time to simulate and compute a highly realistic and detailed terrain is the main goal, thus this thesis will present a method to overcome the speed deficiency while keeping the details of the terrain present.

External representations (ERs) used in science education are multimodal ensembles consisting of design elements to convey educational meanings to the audience. As an example of a dynamic ER, an animation presenting its content features (i.e., scientific concepts) via varying the feature’s depiction over time. A production team invited the dissertation author to inspect their creation of a biochemistry animation about the role of the actin cytoskeleton in cell motility and the animation’s implication on learning. To address this, the author developed a four-step methodology entitled the Multimodal Variation Analysis of Dynamic External Representations (MVADER) that deconstructs the animation’s content and design to inspect how each content feature is conveyed via the animation’s design elements.

This dissertation research investigated the actin animation’s educational value and the MVADER’s utility in animation evaluation. The research design was guided by descriptive case study methodology and an integrated framework consisting of the variation theory, multimodal analysis, and visual analytics. As stated above, the animation was analyzed using MVADER. The development of the actin animation and the content features the production team members intended to convey via the animation were studied by analyzing the communication records between the members, observing the team meetings, and interviewing the members individually. Furthermore, students’ learning experiences from watching the animation were examined via semi-structured interviews coupled with post- storyboarding. Moreover, the instructions of MVADER and its applications in studying the actin animation were reviewed to determine the MVADER’s usefulness as an animation evaluation tool.

Findings of this research indicate that the three educators in the production team intended the actin animation to convey forty-three content features to the undergraduate biology students. At least 50% of the student who participated in this thesis learned thirty-five of these forty-three (> 80%) features. Evidence suggests that the animation’s effectiveness to convey its features was associated with the features’ depiction time, the number of identified design elements applied to depict the features, and the features’ variation of depiction over time.

Additionally, one-third of the student participants made similar mistakes regarding two content features after watching the actin animation: the F-actin elongation and the F-actin crosslink structure in lamellipodia. The analysis reveals the animation’s potential design flaws that might have contributed to these common misconceptions. Furthermore, two disruptors to the creation process and the educational value of the actin animation were identified: the vagueness of the learning goals and the designer’s placement of the animation’s beauty over its reach to the learning goals. The vagueness of the learning goals hampered the narration scripting process. On the other hand, the designer’s prioritization of the animation’s aesthetic led to the inclusion of a “beauty shot” in the animation that caused students’ confusion.

MVADER was used to examine the content, design, and their relationships in the actin animation at multiple aspects and granularities. The result of MVADER was compared with the students’ learning outcomes from watching the animation to identify the characteristics of content’s depiction that were constructive and disruptive to learning. These findings led to several practical recommendations to teach using the actin animation and create educational ERs.

To conclude, this dissertation discloses the connections between the creation process, the content and design, and the educational implication of a biochemistry animation. It also introduces MVADER as a novel ER analysis tool to the education research and visualization communities. MVADER can be applied in various formats of static and dynamic ERs and beyond the disciplines of biology and chemistry.

Future employment of computer-programming jobs will be best for applicants with experience in different languages and coding tools (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018). Empirical and meta-analysis research studies support of teaching Logo programming in developing student cognitive problem-solving skills has been documented. Using guided instruction with teacher-mediated scaffolding Exploring Computer Science with MicroworldsEX (Walsh, 2013-2017) has been found as an effective method in preparing students using the Logo code programming language to create geometric graphic, animation, and gaming projects. More research is needed to study teacher scaffolding and mediation skills to support learning Logo coding and transfer to other domains including other programming environments.

In this paper we aim to present a conceptual framework for virtual creation, exploration, and representation of architectural space. This framework will allow us to establish a method that will drive the viewer along a path, intended by the researcher, to experience, interact and get feedback of spaces in study, through linear or interactive narratives.Space virtual computational representation tools have evolved over the last decades and are now providing advanced new tools from gaming, AI and VR real-time complex fictional environments creation, depiction and interaction. From interior spaces to planetary systems, replicated or fictional, sets for all kinds of computer simulation models with immersive possibilities can be created and explored.In a linear visual narrative of a 3D animation the viewer is carried, without choice, by the flow of visual narrative storytelling, through several spaces, events, conclusions, expectations, premonitions, anticipations, empathy and characters and environments, fictional readings in dreamlike narratives, where reality and fantasy can be blended. In an interactive tale storytelling and script, the linearity would become in theoretically infinite lines of possible events and plots, with diverse endings, in which a narrative story line diverges in multiple plots.Having a set of formal parameterized elements within a grammatical lexicon that constitute and methodological approach to an architectural object in a study, it is intended to look at methods to experience, interact and get feedback of spaces in study, through visual multiple narratives, linear or interactive, being immersed or not. All these narrative approaches imply a script and visual grammars, storyline, and plot, where the player looks or travels through a fictional space, in a lived and experiential way.For conception and planning as for studying or research in the architectural field, this is an area of expertise to explore, as these new graphic computing tools can pursue new approaches, using several methods available to apply in each research, to provide analysis breakthroughs.