Blog

We sent AC Atienza to the GI Jam, Fall 2018. This is their firsthand account.

"GI Game Jam as someone who knows absolutely nothing about programming and also went alone" - AC Atienza

I went to my first game jam this past weekend! Overall it was a really good, fun experience. I went to the Jam alone and before I started I knew absolutely nothing about programming.

Rina Wehbe, Games Institute resident and Computer Science PhD student, attended and mentored at the 2018 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) in Houston, Texas. Her travels were sponsored by the Women in Computer Science (WiCS) group at UWaterloo, organized by Joanne Atlee.

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.

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.

A Spotlight on Games Institute Executive Director, Dr. Neil Randall

An interview with Dr. Kristina R. Llewellyn about the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation project

Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Brianna Wiens took an unconventional path to the GI starting as a PhD student at York University who visited the GI as part of a crew filming a documentary about qCollaborative (qLab)—a feminist design research lab with members from multiple Canadian universities, including UW.

Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Katja Rogers (HCI Games Lab) first met her supervisor and GI faculty member, Dr. Lennart Nacke (Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business), at CHI Play in 2016.

Dr. Stuart Hallifax (HCI Games Lab) would describe his life as “falling backwards into every opportunity he’s been given.” So, how did he fall backwards into joining the GI? Stuart’s journey started in Leon, France, where he studied artificial intelligence for his Master’s in Computer Science.