Gamification
Arclight
Author: Robert Debinski, Emiliano Vega, Tyler Nguyen, Tyler Ruocco, Lucien Zheng
Roguelite is a sub-genre of video games that are inspired by the classic 1980 game Rogue. These games usually involve procedurally generated levels, permadeath, and random loot drops. The player must navigate through a series of increasingly difficult levels while managing limited resources such as health, ammo, and food. Existing roguelite games are 2D and room-based which result in unfair and unbalanced gameplay and limited players engagement, making it difficult to progress or survive. To address this limitation, we propose to design and develop a new 3D roguelite game that is first-person-view, not room-based, and uses procedurally generated levels. The objective of this project is to confirm these characteristics help increasing players’ engagement and reducing the need to replay levels multiple times. The proposed game, called Arclight, is built using Unity Technology Game engine. Arclight is original because it creates a Player versus Environment (PvE) single player game in the first-person point of view. The story and setting take place in a SciFi environment where the character is a bounty hunter starting out in a space station city. Game development is constantly growing and open to new ideas, twists, and genres. To verify and validate our results, we propose to qualitatively evaluate gamers’ play experience using a Global Environmental Survey. We aim to bring a new face and idea to the roguelite genre which we believe the fan base would like. If we stand by our pillars, Arclight will bring a new twist to the roguelite genre.
Arclight
Author: Robert Debinski, Emiliano Vega, Tyler Nguyen, Tyler Ruocco, Lucien Zheng
Roguelite is a sub-genre of video games that are inspired by the classic 1980 game Rogue. These games usually involve procedurally generated levels, permadeath, and random loot drops. The player must navigate through a series of increasingly difficult levels while managing limited resources such as health, ammo, and food. Existing roguelite games are 2D and room-based which result in unfair and unbalanced gameplay and limited players engagement, making it difficult to progress or survive. To address this limitation, we propose to design and develop a new 3D roguelite game that is first-person-view, not room-based, and uses procedurally generated levels. The objective of this project is to confirm these characteristics help increasing players’ engagement and reducing the need to replay levels multiple times. The proposed game, called Arclight, is built using Unity Technology Game engine. Arclight is original because it creates a Player versus Environment (PvE) single player game in the first-person point of view. The story and setting take place in a SciFi environment where the character is a bounty hunter starting out in a space station city. Game development is constantly growing and open to new ideas, twists, and genres. To verify and validate our results, we propose to qualitatively evaluate gamers’ play experience using a Global Environmental Survey. We aim to bring a new face and idea to the roguelite genre which we believe the fan base would like. If we stand by our pillars, Arclight will bring a new twist to the roguelite genre.
Virtual Reality Situational Awareness Training for First Responders Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Author: James Coleman, Jeremy , Labelle2, Thaddeus Murphy3, Colin, Hollister4, Steven Fung
Virtual Reality has become popular in public safety as it can reduce training costs while improving availability, reliability, and accessibility. Pleiadian Systems Corporation has created a fire fighter training platform that incorporates gaming techniques and provide rich simulation scenarii. This platform offers realistic training exercises, preventing fire fighter injuries, and giving trainers access to assessment metrics to evaluate their performances. However, current simulations fail to provide rich environments embedded with sophisticated resources such as sensors, equipment, cameras, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) that support decision making and enhance situational awareness. To address this problem, we propose to expand the existing fire fighter training platform with an immersive virtual reality UAV training simulator allowing for their configurations, monitoring, command, and control. Our project will allow training of fire science students and professional fire fighters while involving the virtual use of advanced tools and resources. Trainees will use UAV to identify areas of interest, visualize data provided by Geographic Information Systems (GIS), assess critical assets, and improve their overall situational awareness. To verify and validate our proposed project, we will design, implement, and integrate a UAV software simulator. Academic and industrial collaborators will experiment virtual reality training sessions with students and professional fire fighters. The collected feedback will help calibrate our models, fine tune our simulation scenario, and confirm the outcomes of the proposed project.
Hellsmoke
Author: Ryan Gibbons, Lester Barrios
Pleiadean Systems Corporation created an immersive, virtual reality firefighter training simulation platform, called HellSmoke. This simulation platform incorporates gaming techniques and provide rich simulation scenarii. Hellsmoke offers realistic training exercises, preventing fire fighter injuries, and giving trainers access to assessment metrics to evaluate their performances. However, HellSmoke suffers from critical technological limitations. First, HellSmoke fails to provide realistic fire and smoke simulations because of poor task optimization, limited memory management, and missing parallelism processing. Moreover, the current software architecture is a conventional desktop solution with traditional client-server approach. Because of this architecture style, HellSmoke requires expensive hardware with advanced specifications involving a sophisticated laptop and a set of VR headsets. Such owned hardware incurs operational and maintenance costs and limits scalability, portability, and accessibility of Hellsmoke. To address these challenges, we propose to conduct a performance study which considers a smoke and fire simulation model that enables parallelizes processing leveraging the combination of Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). Additionally, we propose to take advantage of the capacity of cloud computing to revise HellSmoke’s software architecture to offer anywhere accessibility, flexible resources, and economies of scale. With our contributions, fire science students and professional fire figthers can run HellSmoke without powerful hardware, access a training session anytime and from anywhere without compromising the realistic, interactive, and immersive quality of the learning experience.
Stellarium VR
Author: Ryan Horgan, Hugh John Dunkley, Oliva Knight, Michael Shea
StellariumVR is an educational, virtual reality application spearheaded by four game developers and programmers, studying Computer Science at the University of New Haven. A popular trend in education and experiential learning today is Virtual Reality or VR. As VR has become increasingly affordable and wide-spread, educational companies and institutions alike have pushed to develop content that makes use of this new medium. When it comes to astronomy education, Stellarium is the de facto personal teaching aid in use. Unfortunately, as powerful as the software is, it lacks a key element that is typically only found during an in-person planetarium experience: immersion. Using the existing Stellarium platform, an open-source astronomy simulator, we aim to continue its mission of creating an immersive and captivating experience. To accomplish this, we take the computational power and unrivaled astronomical databases of Stellarium and bring them to a more portable, mobile, and immersive VR experience geared towards teaching astronomy. StellariumVR will provide a relatively low-cost option for schools to create guided astronomy lessons for their students without worrying about the logistics of multiple planetarium trips or sacrificing the planetarium experience.