4th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES’12)

The 4th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES’12) will be held between 29-31 October, in Genoa, Italy 2012. The emergence of serious or meaningful uses of games technologies and virtual world applications have been swift and dramatic over the last years. As a result, there has been little time to develop the theoretical and academic rigor in the emerging field. This problem has been exacerbated by the largely technological drive of the applications, with often little time to consider more user-centered approaches to design and use of serious applications of games and virtual world technologies. Another factor affecting the field has been the general aspects of convergence between new technologies, such as AI applications, augmented reality, mobile technologies, GPS technologies, sensor technologies and social software. Together, this has presented potential for developing new technologies based upon immersive and interactive interfaces and has in parallel produced many unanswered questions in terms of the usage of the formats. As a result, there is a clear need to consider new frameworks, theories, methods and design strategies for making serious applications of games and virtual world technologies more effective and useful as part of education, health and training.

The 4th International Conference in Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications aims to meet the significant challenges of the cross-disciplinary community that work around these serious application areas by bringing the community together to share case studies of practice, to present new frameworks, methodologies and theories and to begin the process of developing shared cross-disciplinary outputs. In order to achieve this main aim the conference will pioneer new methods for bringing together and supporting communities of practice emerging in themed areas beyond the duration of the conference. Using the conference as an ignition to support a wider aspiration to form and sustain a community of practice around the field. The term 'Serious Games' covers a broad range of applications from flash-based animations to totally immersive and code driven 3D environments where users interface with large volumes of data through sophisticated and interactive digital interfaces. This shift towards immersive world applications being used to support education, health and training activities marks the beginning of new challenges that offer real scope for collaborative and multi-disciplinary research solutions, and real opportunities for innovative development.

More information:

http://www.vs-games2012.org/

Serious Games

On the 18th November 2011, Dr. Fotis Liarokapis gave an invited talk to the ‘V-Must Workshop 2: Virtual Heritage, Games and Movie’, Archeovirtual 2011, held at Paestum, Italy. The title of the talk was ‘Serious Games’.

The talk focused on the main technologies used for serious games. In addition, two projects which are currently running at iWARG were presented including crowd modeling and procedural modeling.

More information:

http://www.vhlab.itabc.cnr.it/archeovirtual/workshop.htm

Robots and Avatars

This event will consist of a collection of four talks from experts in domains related to robots, avatars and interaction. It will consider key issues in the construction and control of real and virtual social entities andimplications for social interaction with humans.

Organiser:
Dr Christopher Peters, Coventry University (aa5547@coventry.ac.uk)

Speakers:
- Dr Ginevra Castellano, University of Birmingham
- Dr Fotis Liarokapis, Coventry University
- Dr Mark Huckvale, University College London
- Dr Asimina Vasalou, University of Birmingham

Outline of the event:
14:00 Introduction
14:30 Session 1: Robots and Interaction

"Long-term interaction with robot companions" by Dr Ginevra Castellano, School of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering / HCI Centre, University of Birmingham. The talk will consider the implementation of social capabilities for robot companions based on the EU FP7 'LIREC' project including affect recognition and the issue of forming affective between humans and robots.

"Human-machine interfaces" by Dr Fotis Liarokapis, Department of Computing / Interactive Worlds Applied Research Group Coventry University. This talk will focus on human-machine interfaces for control and communication between humans and machines, focussing on the use of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI).

15:45 Session 2: Avatars and Interaction

"Virtual characters and spoken language" by Dr Mark Huckvale, Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London. This talk will present a computational model of spoken language acquisition in a virtual infant as part of the KLAIR project: a state of the art toolkit allowing a virtual infant to see, hear, talk and express emotions.

"Avatars, self presentation and social media" Dr Asimina VasalouSchool of Computer Science / HCI, University of Birmingham. This talk will consider issues related to how people decide to portray and represent themselves through personalised digital personas ('avatars') and implications in social media.

16:45 Wrap-up and Close

Location: 2 p.m. - 5 p.m. Wednesday, November 9th 2011AS324, Armstrong Siddeley Building, Coventry University

Mind-Minding Machines

On Monday 12th September 2011, Dr. Chris Peters will give an invited talk at the British Science Festival. The title of the seminar will be 'Mind-Minding Machines'. For more information a brief abstract is provided below:

Abstract Machines capable of being socially sensitive to humans, to empathise and interact with them for example, have been featured in many popular works of science fiction. But just how far are such machines from becoming reality? This talk considers how computational mindreading capabilities may better ensure that human and machine see eye to eye on important issues.

More information:

http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/forms/festival/events/showevent2.asp?EventID=462

VS-Games 2011 Keynote Presentations

The two keynote presentations from VS-Games 2011 have been uploaded and they are free to access. The first presentation was given by Prof. Carol O' Sullivan and was entitled ‘Socially realistic virtual humans and crowds’ while the second one was given by Prof. Peter Comninos and was entitled ‘Hybrid Object Modelling’.

Both presentations can be accessed from:

http://www.blod.gr/lectures/Pages/viewevent.aspx?EventID=17

Interactive Worlds Applied Research Group demonstrates the power of the mind at Gadget Show Live

Coventry University's E-dition has a new press release regarding iWARG. In particular, BSc student Athanasios Vourvopoulos and Dr. Fotis Liarokapis from the University’s Interactive Worlds ARG recently attended the Gadget Show Live. The team presented a prototype that uses a brain computer interface (Neurosky Mindset) for controlling a Lego NXT Mindstorms Robot – a brain powered robot! The robot performs basic movements based on the attention levels of the user. Different attention levels will accelerate or decelerate the robot accordingly.

Earlier this month Athanasios Vourvopoulos also presented a co-authored (with Dr. Fotis Liarokapis) paper with title ‘Brain-controlled NXT Robot - Tele-operating a robot through brain electrical activity’, to the 3rd International Conference in Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-Games 2011). The paper focuses on the research of human-robot interaction through tele-operation with the help of brain-computer interfaces.

More information:

https://staff.coventry.ac.uk/news/pages/edition.aspx?editionID=4501#4513

Digital Media Grand Challenge Faculty Champion

Coventry University Grand Challenge Initiatives represent core applied research themes including: Low Carbon, Ageing, Digital Media, Transport, Agriculture and Buildings.

Dr. Fotis Liarokapis was recently nominated as the Faculty Champion (Faculty of Engineering and Computing) for the Digital Media Grand Challenge.

More information:

http://uk.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3692167

http://twitter.com/#!/grandchallenge