Blog

Several members of the Games Institute and the UW Touchlab participated in the 13th annual ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces & Spaces (ISS) in Tokyo, Japan from November 25-28, 2018. The research they presented ranged from work on multi-touch surfaces and interactive 3D spaces to optimizing how health care providers collect feedback from patients.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a popular AAA game set in a post-post apocalyptic world where you play as a female protagonist, Aloy, and use a focus - an Augmented Reality-style interface - to help you battle mechanical animals. The game set the stage for the conversation, but the spotlight was on the panelists.

Alexandra Orlando, an alum of the Games Institute and a former Editor in Chief for First Person Scholar, maintains a YouTube channel for academically-oriented games criticism. When she's not working on video essays, she works as freelance writer.

How can games guide us, change us, and help us?

This was the question that left me speechless, simply because I wasn’t sure where to begin or even how to fully answer it. The question was the first of many posed by an eager group of Mexican exchange students visiting the GI.

Lindsay Meaning gave a Brown Bag talk on the process of adapting a literary text into a video game on Tuesday, October 16. Meaning is a second-year English PhD candidate whose research interests include video game adaptations and representations of settler-colonialism and imperial ideologies in roleplaying games.

According to Meaning, game adaptations are often looked down on - misconceived as "cashing in on a popular franchise". And when game adaptations of literary texts are studied, they are frequently analyzed for how faithful they are to the source material.

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.