News

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.

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,

On February 10, the Critical Media Lab with support from members of Feminist Think Tank and the GI held a virtual data jam and discussion on the issues of big data, machine learning, and how discrimination is encoded into our technology.

The Winter semester GI Jam was hosted as part of the Global Game Jam from January 26 – 30. Game makers of all ages and abilities came together to improve their game design skills. The four-day long jam provided tutorials and discussions on how to brainstorm, prototype, and develop games. Game Jam captains Alexander Glover (PhD) and Arielle Grinberg (PhD) led participants through paper prototypes and game concepts and helped them explore game mechanics, narrative, and artwork in addition to programming. At the end of the event, two games were created and presented.

The virtual reality experience “Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation” (DOHR) was recently peer-reviewed in Reviews in Digital Humanities volume 3 issue 1 on January 18^th, 2022.

The DOHR project uses VR to explore the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children (NSHCC) as part of the curriculum for Grade 11 Canadian History students in Nova Scotia. NSHCC was opened in 1921 and operated until the 1980s and former Residents have come forward with stories of the physical, psychological, and sexual abuse they suffered there as children.