Current students

Tina Chan, GI resident and Masters of Science candidate in the School of Public Health and Health Systems, was a speaker at this year's TEDxUW conference. She took the stage to share the story of how she came to develop the Panic Anxiety Stress Support (PASS) kit.

September 14 and 15, 2018, four playwrights came to the GI for an intensive workshop on VR filmmaking. The workshop was hosted by Gada Jane, Research Associate at the GI, and Michael Wheeler, Co-Creator and Artistic Director of SpiderWebShow Performance.

The playwrights were Erin Brandenburg, playwright and director, Rosamund Small, playwright and writer, Nicolas Billon, playwright and screenwriter, and Ahmad Meree, playwright and performer.

Justin Carpenter, GI resident and First Person Scholar Editor, will be presenting a paper at this year's Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Toronto, November 15-18. His paper looks at how the games Mountain (2014) and Everything (2017) by Irish artist David OReilly challenge players to reconsider notions of consciousness, things, and nature.

Carpenter argues that both games are "meditations on games as a medium":

Last week, neurophysiologists and VR researchers at the University of Waterloo started making headlines because of their findings on how to predict which VR users might be more susceptible to cybersickness.

Séamas Weech, Jessy Varghese, and Michael Barnett-Cowan, members of the VR working group at the Games Institute, co-authored a paper entitled "Estimating the sensorimotor components of cybersickness" published in the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Séamas Weech, Jessy Varghese, and Michael Barnett-Cowan, members of the VR working group at the Games Institute, co-authored a paper entitled "Estimating the sensorimotor components of cybersickness" published in the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Their results caught the attention of many, many news outlets who were picking the story up and claiming that UW researchers are on the cusp of curing cybersickness. Here are just a few...

Brown Bag: Jonathan Rodriguez

Games Institute alumnus Jonathan Rodriguez joined us September 21 to give a Brown Bag talk on working in the VR film industry. Rodriguez has been working at Felix & Paul studios, a VR film making start-up based in Montreal, since 2017. In this talk, Jonathan discussed his role as a software developer in a creative industry.

Gada Jane, Research Associate at the GI, hosted a VR storytelling workshop in partnership with Michael Wheeler, Artistic Director at SpiderWebShow Performance. The two-day workshop took place Sept 14-15.

Jane and Wheeler invited playwrights and actors from the GTA and KW regions to learn about VR and develop strategies for using the medium to tell stories. Participants entered the workshop with little-to-no experience with VR and by the time they left they had produced their own VR performance.