EIS at UC Santa Cruz

“Façade tried to solve this problem by replacing the parrot with something more like a brain-damaged human; Heavy Rain, by comparison, is probably the best-trained parrot in history.” From Archie Bland’s Control freak: Will David Cage’s ‘Heavy Rain’ videogame push our buttons?

“Developing Games for 2020”
Bob Mitchell, ohai

Date: Thursday, February 25th
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Abstract
Students at UC Santa Cruz today will be among the engineers, artists, designers, and producers leading game teams in 2020.Review some of the changes to interactive entertainment over the last ten years in order to look ahead to the possibilities in 2020. The most obvious changes will be in the hardware our games run on. The more difficult predictions will be figuring out what our players want from their games.

The challenge for the game industry is to adapt and to continue building fun and engaging experiences. Start preparing for this future today.

Biography
Bob Mitchell is the Lead Client Engineer at ohai, an internet startup making handcrafted massively multiplayer online (MMO) games for everyone. He joined ohai after eleven years at Sony Online Entertainment where he was the Director of Technology and a programmer on four (MMOs): EverQuest, PlanetSide, EverQuest II, and Free Realms. His various contributions to the games released at SOE included user interfaces, localization, game systems, server architecture, numerous Flash minigames, PlayStation3 downloadable titles, installers, web integration, and project management.

Bob graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in systems engineering and was a technical manager at QUALCOMM before returning to his childhood passion: computer games.

“Players are Artists, Too”
Henry Lowood, Stanford University

Date: Thursday, February 18th
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

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 Digital Media Theater.

Abstract
It is easy to provoke debate by posing a simple question, such as, “Are digital games a form of art?” A less controversial observation would be that it takes a lot of artists to make a digital game. This dichotomy between the theoretical exercise and the practical observation frames my interest in the creative player. As I have written elsewhere, it strikes me that rumination about the status of games as artistic works, while stimulating and useful, often distracts attention from more important aspects of expression through the medium of interactive computer and video games. Let me say before I am misunderstood that critical attention to game design, art and programming, all as parts of defining the authorial or artistic roles of game developers is a core problem for game studies. Players would not be using games to express their talents if game developers had not given them compelling games. Now that I have said that, let me reveal my point-of-view: The creativity of players is as compelling as game design. Player creativity has defined the digital game as a platform for personal or artistic expression. Player creativity, including the multiple forms of performance and spectatorship that it has spawned, deserves more attention from game studies. Players are artists, too.

Henry Lowood is curator for history of science & technology collections and film & media collections at Stanford University. After being trained in the history of science and technology and receiving his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, over a period of more than twenty years he has combined interests in history, technological innovation and the history of digital games and simulations to head several long-term projects at Stanford, including How They Got Game: The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Videogames in the Stanford Humanities Lab, the Silicon Valley Archives in the Stanford University Libraries and the Machinima Archives and Archiving Virtual Worlds collections hosted by the Internet Archive. He is leading Stanford’s work on game and virtual world preservation in the Preserving Virtual Worlds project funded by the U.S. Library of Congress. He is also the author of numerous articles and essays on the history of Silicon Valley and the development of digital game technology and culture. With Michael Nitsche, he is currently co-editing The Machinima Reader for MIT Press and just completed guest-editing a volume of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing on the history of computers and games.

“Animating the Gesture Style of Particular Individuals”
Michael Neff, UC Davis

Date: Friday, February 12th
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Engineering 2, Room 599
Hosted By: Professor Marilyn Walker, Dept. of Computer Science

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 Engineering 2.

Abstract
In this talk, I will provide an overview of some of the work we have done
towards building gesture animation systems. The motivating goal of this
work is to develop systems that take novel text as input and provide as
output an animated character that says the text while gesticulating
appropriately in the style of a specified target subject. Our process
starts with video or motion capture of a person whose gesturing style we
wish to imitate. An analysis of this data is used to build a statistical
model of the person’s particular gesturing style. Using this model and
input text tagged with theme, rheme and focus, our generation algorithm
creates a gesture script. This script is passed to an animation system,
which enhances the gesture description with additional detail. It then
generates either kinematic or physically simulated motion based on this
description. The system is capable of generating gesture animations for
novel text that are consistent with a given performer’s style, as was
successfully validated in an empirical user study. Time permitting, I
will also discuss recent work on modeling lower body movement and new
tools for analysis-based synthesis.

Michael Neff is an assistant professor in Computer Science and
Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. Before
coming to Davis, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute
for Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany. In 2005, he completed his
Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Toronto. His main research
interests focus on character animation, in particular, the modeling of
expressive movement, physics-based animation, human gesture, animation
tools and the application of performing arts knowledge to computer
animation. At Davis, he is working to bridge the art and technology
communities on campus, collaborating with computer scientists, dancers,
choreographers and geologists. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER
Award, the Alain Fournier Award for his dissertation (2005) and a best
paper award from Intelligent Virtual Agents (2007).