Several prospective students attended the EQUIS lab today as a part of the Aboriginal Discovery Days event at
Students design a Liberi Live level
Queen’s University. Representing the school of computing, the lab demoed two of our current projects to the prospective students. Participants were invited to play Liberi and Liberi Live to learn more about our game orchestration project and the CP Fit N’ Fun project.
Tad giving his exergame presentation
Several members of the EQUIS lab attended the 2012 Queen’s Graduate Computing Society Conference. This conference showcases the research of many of Queen’s computer science students.
Tad Stach gave a presentation on his work in Exergames, winning the best presentation award for his presentation titled ‘Improving Group Exercise with Exergames’.
Tad’s presentation discussed the benefits of group exercise and his proposed exergame balancing method for players of different fitness levels.
Two members of the EQUIS lab are attending this year’s ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Austin, Texas. CHI brings together researchers from around the world who specialize in human computer interaction to meet and discuss their work.
The Gekku Race minigame, a part of the CP Fit 'n' Fun project
At this year’s conference Hamilton Hernandez will be giving a technical presentation on his paper: Design of an Exergaming Station for Children with Cerebral Palsy. This paper relates to the work he has been doing on the CP Fit ‘n’ Fun project.
CKWS Television recently visited the EQUIS lab to report on the Liberi Live project. Liberi Live is a platform that allows players to both design and play games in real-time. Check out the video where Nick Graham, Irina Schumann (an exchange student from the LEIF project), and Zi Ye demonstrate Liberi Live.
You can read the full article here.
Tad Stach was recently interviewed by the host of the Video Games: Brain Gain or Drain? show on WebTalkRadio.net, Jayne Gakenbach. In his interview, Tad discusses exergame research taking place at the EQUIS lab. You can listen to the full episode online.
Banani Roy presents DiscoTech: A Toolkit for Handling User Level Disconnection Problems in Synchronous Groupware
Five members of the EQUIS lab attended the GRAND 2011 Annual General Meeting in Vancouver. GRAND brings together researchers in graphics, animation and new media from 24 universities from across Canada. At the conference, Banani Roy presented a poster and gave a work in progress presentation on DiscoTech, a toolkit for disconnection in synchronous groupware. Ameer Hamza and Hamilton Hernandez also presented and poster and gave a demo on their work on CP Fit ́n ́ Fun: Health & Social Benefits of Virtual Exercise Games in Adolescents with Cerebral Palsy and Cheryl Savery presented “Timelines for Shared Data in Multiplayer Games” based on her work on the Janus toolkit.
Come join us for the end of year show for CISC 877, Engineering Digital Games. The students will be showing off their games, and allowing you to play along.
The show is Friday April 8, 2011, 2:30-4:00 PM, at 141 Collingwood St.
This year’s presentations will be by Jesse Burstyn, Ameer Hamza, Hamilton Hernandez, Tayyab Javed, Aneesh Tarun and Zi Ye.
See you there!
The presence of network latency can lead to usability problems in distributed groupware applications. Techniques exist that help mitigate the effects of latency, however, as these techniques necessitate the manipulation of state over time, the effort required to implement them can be significant. At the CSCW 2011 conference in Hangzhou, China, we presented timelines, a programming model that allows the explicit treatment of time in groupware applications.
Timelines allow programmers to access and manipulate shared state data in the past, present and future
The Timelines model has been implemented as part of the Janus toolkit. For more information see:
Asymmetric Roles in the Frozen Treasure Hunter Game
One of the most important factors motivating people to participate in physical exercise is having someone else to do it with. But when inactive people start a new sport, it can be difficult for them to find friends who are at a comparable fitness level. People new to sports face the enormously demotivating experience of losing again and again, and of letting down their team.
At the Serious Games Summit this week (part of the Game Developers Conference), Tad Stach is showing how multiplayer exergames can address this problem by automatically balancing play, allowing people of different physical abilities to exercise together. Tad is reviewing three approaches for that we have investigated in the EQUIS Lab: providing players with asymmetric roles, adjusting difficulty based on heart rate, and adjusting difficulty through kinesthetic haptic feedback.
For more information, see our work on Computer-Aided Exercise.
Christopher Wolfe presents at ITS 2010.
Fast and accurate touch detection is critical to the usability of multi-touch surfaces. Many large surfaces are based on optical technologies, such as FTIR or DI, that extract touches from noisy camera input. In our paper at ITS 2010, in Saarbrücken, Germany, we presented a novel algorithm for better noise reduction. Our technique improves touch recognition over current alternatives, particularly in noisy environments, without additional computational cost.
Our presentation attracted interest from both academic and industrial attendees, and will hopefully contribute to their future works. The foundation of our technique is a novel fast algorithm for applying piecewise-polynomial image filters, such as the quadratic mid-pass filter we use for noise reduction. This algorithm can be easily implemented in many forms (e.g. on a GPU or using a FPGA), so promises improved results and lowered costs across a wide variety of image processing applications.
