Ideas
From DIT Experimental Gaming Group
Contents |
Blue Skies
Emotional Middleware
At the [GDC] AI sessions this year one of the big themes seemed to be the need to create more emotionally realistic NPC's in games. It might be possible to create an emotion middleware library. This would be a software framework that could be integrated into the existing AI controlling characters in a game that would give the character "emotions". This might take the form of emotional modelling or emotional expressiveness. This project would combine psychology with computer science. The output might be a software version of [Data's] emotion chip.
Emotion & Attachment in Virtual Worlds
Games such as Half Life 2 and Darwinia use different techniques to make the player identify with the NPC's. Half Life 2 uses very realistic facial animation (expensive & time consuming) while Darwinia uses audio and story to make the player identify with simple 2D sprites. The aim of this project would be to develop new techniques to make players develop attachments to NPC's and objects in virtual worlds. It would combine techniques from media and computer games.
Computer Games for Animals
Computer games are typically developed with human players in mind. There are no computer games for animals, yet many animals love playing games! The aim of this project would be to investigate the development of computer games for animals. Maybe a robot ballthrowing game for a dog, maybe using a rovio. Even better if it could teach the dog tricks. Looking at reward, feedback mechanisms for animals.
Robot Body Parts
Given a task, the aim would be to assemble a robot from various parts: motors, wheels, arms vision and AI components to acomplish certain tasks
Games People Play
Games based on AI bots using the games in the book [Games People Play]
An AI thing
Combine a conversational agent with speech recognition, text to speech and a robot to create an artificial life form
The Environment
Family Driver
A game to encourage people to drive in a fuel efficient manner. It would maybe be a family driving simulation where the tasks are family driving activities, such as getting the children to school etc. The player can make decisions such as whether to walk or drive, depending on different factors. The aim when driving would be to keep the revs low rather than to get there in the quickest time. Could use peripherals such as force feedback steering wheel to make the game more immersive.
Power House
Power house is a game that puts the player in charge of managing the power consumption in a house over the course of the day. Again there would be tasks to be achieved such as cooking the dinner, washing clothes etc. A first step in researching this game would be to monitor the power usage of various domestic appliances. The house could have sims like avatars that have various needs and that switch on devices and leave them on and you would have to try and minimise the power consumption of your avatars. The game could be scaled up to managing several houses, and up to say a factory or a hospital. The purpose of the game would be to teach people about the relationship between their power consumption and their carbon footprint, which would get bigger the more power they use.
Health
Orthopaedic Surgery Exercise Game
A game to help older people recovering from orthopaedic surgery to do their exercises. Would possible incorporate a physical/sensor based component. Would have to take into consideration user interface and design requirements for an older person. Also would have to be a game that would not only encourage a person to do their exercises, but also be appealing to an older person (such as card games/bingo etc.)
Interactive Trainer
Again targeted at people recovering from orthopaedic surgery, the aim of this game would be to develop an interactive simulation of walking, sitting, lying down, carrying and lifting that shows people how to perform these activites safely.
Kid squash
The aim would be to bring children across a road. Could use gory, particle physics and audio to show the consequences of loosing the game. Could equally be developed for cyclists to encourage them to cycle safely.
Bar Fly
Some kind of game to show the long term effects of the abuse of alcohol. The aim of the game is to find activities for the character to keep the game character out of the pub. Too much pub and the characters health suffers.
Music
Machine Annotation of Traditional Irish Dance
The [MATT2] project is software for annotating recordings of traditional dance music. The aim of this project would be to develop a system for annotating videos of traditional Irish dance. One approach would be to use motion capture, dance mats or sensors and build a semantic model from the inputs of the sensors. A more challenging approach would be to use image processing.
Keyboard Skills
A 3D platform game that generates a level based on the score of a piece of music. You might have to jump up for example as the pitch increases or jump down as the pitch decreases. You would use a piano to control the game. The aim of the game would be to teach piano keyboard skills.
Virtual Session
A game that consists of virtual avatars playing traditional music in a session. The aim of this game would be to allow a learner traditional musician to sit in in the session and play along without offending any real musicians. Great for learner bodhran players or guitar players. The simulation could also teach session etiquite.
Teaching
Online Robocode
The aim of this game would be to encourage students to study programming by having the students program the AI for robot tanks (perhaps) similar to robocode or Project Hoshimi. This game should work online through a web browser (possibly Flash based or JavaFX). The programming of the robots should be through a drag and drop interface similar to Lego Mindstorms. It should be possible to upgrade robots with add on weapons and sheilds as the player progresses through each round of the game. Games should be mellee based or one on one and should be played online, with robots from different players competing against each other. I think cartoon graphics are required for this game. We should try and collaborate with the Tipperary Institute on this project as they have been running Robocode for years.
Maths
There have been many attempts to develop computer games to help students learn maths. In fact a better way to develop maths skills is to program games. Programming computer games is in fact a great way to learn maths/geometry etc. The aim of this framework is to develop a programming course, the aim of which is to teach maths. This should be aimed at secondary school students to stimulate interest in maths, physics, problem solving, algorithm design, programming and creative thinking.
Physics
A physics engine based game that supports rigid bodies (geometric shapes), levers and balances, buoyancy, springs and pendulums . The aim of the game would be to solve Physics puzzles and at the same time learn the laws of physics/applied maths.
