EIS at UC Santa Cruz

Submission for the StarCraft AI Competition is now open. Complete details are provided at the submission site.

New Scientist is running an article about the use of data mining in computer games. The article focuses on research being presented at the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2010). Catch live coverage of the conference here.

Command your space bovine!

In space, social interactions are sparse. Space Cow Clicker overcomes this problem. In this parody of a satire, you command a battlecruiser (Space Cow) in an epic battle  to click enemy units. The first player to click all of the opponent forces wins: To click is natural, to command is Bovine!

“Acting for embodied interactive narrative”

Ken Perlin, NYU

Date: July 16th, 2010
Time: 1:15pm
Place: Engineering 2, Room 192

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the School of Engineering.

Abstract

The transition from game play to emotionally believable embodied interactive protagonist-driven narrative requires something more radical than better animation blending or motion capture.  It requires rethinking the process of virtual acting from the ground up.  We must abandon linear thinking altogether and create virtual actors that can move, emote, interact and respond in real time with plausible expression, emotion and body language.

This talk will consist of two parts.  The first will build a bridge between the genres of linear film narrative and embodied interactive narrative, establishing which principles need to be preserved and which need to change.  The second part of the talk will show how these principles are guiding the creation of true acting for embodied interactive narrative.

There will be cool demos.

Ken Perlin, an NYU professor of Computer Science, directs the NYU Games For Learning Institute, was founding director of the Media Research Laboratory, directed the NYU Center for Advanced Technology, researches graphics, animation, user interfaces and science education, received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement, the 2008 ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the TrapCode award for computer graphics achievement, the NYC Mayor’s award for excellence in Science and Technology, the Sokol award for outstanding NYU Science faculty, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, has been a featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art, received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from NYU, B.A. in mathematics from Harvard, was Head of Software Development at R/GREENBERG Associates, System Architect for computer animation at MAGI, served on the Board of Directors of the New York chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH and the New York Software Industry Association, and is 2010 general chair of UIST.