The GI Game Jam ran from September 29th to October 2nd, led by Jam co-captains, PhD students Joseph Tu (Systems Design Engineering) and Alexander Glover (Management Sciences). The Jam saw the development of 17 games.
Dr. Shana Macdonald (Communication Arts) was interviewed on July 11th about the massive Canada-wide Rogers outage that saw many Canadians without access to the internet, phone service, or even ATMs.
On June 29th, Member of Parliament Bill Blair presented Dean of Health Dr. Lili Liu and her team with $2.1 million dollars of funding over three years to support their project to enhance search and rescue capabilities for when people with dementia go missing.
The project titled “Managing Risks of Going Missing among Persons Living with Dementia by Building Capacities of SAR Personnel, First Responders and Communities” will create dementia-friendly resources across six provinces and in collaboration with two indigenous communities, the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba and the Kahnawá:ke Mohawk Territory in Quebec.
The Velocity Concept Funding Grant Finals took place on July 14th, both virtually and in person at the Student Life Center. Out of 49 total applicants, 9 teams of students compete for four $5,000 funding awards for their innovative projects. While the competition finals are normally eight teams, this year the judges decided nine was necessary due to the high quality of the competitors.
On July 5th, GI membersDr. John Muñoz (J&F Alliance), Dr. Lili Liu (Dean of Faculty of Health), and Dr. Michael Barnett Cowan (Kinesiology and Health Sciences) came together to discuss the overlap between using games in areas of health.
University of Waterloo researchers have been awarded over $4.4 million in funding by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) this month.
Multiple Games Institute faculty members received SSHRC Insight funding to support their research totalling nearly a million dollars!
Dr. Bo Ruberg presented on their upcoming book Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies on April 18. The virtual talk explored the histories and stories surrounding the interactive and playful sexual technologies. Ruberg’s research includes the complex history of sex dolls and robots and how that history has been misrepresented, often pointing back to rudimentary sex dolls supposedly made by European sailors.
Professor Darren Wershler spoke to Sabrina Marandola for CBC Radio on March 14th 2022, about teaching his class “Video Games and/as Theory” at Concordia University within Minecraft during the pandemic.
Games Institute postdoctoral fellow Dr. John Muñoz and NASA Distinguished Research Associate Dr. Alan Pope are presenting their research on biofeedback and games at the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 21st.
Games Institute Executive Director Neil Randall and other representatives from The University of Waterloo are working together on a trans-Atlantic collaboration with The University of Warwick, focusing on collegiate esports.
Members of the two schools have been meeting to share their experiences and discuss ways that they can help each other innovate and grow their esports programs.
UW Professor Ian Rowlands, Associate Vice-President, International, explains,