Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Based on data collected through 40 in-depth interviews, it is found that (a) the balance between perceived challenges and skills, and (b) the types of in-game social interactions can both facilitate and impede the enjoyment of game playing. Through these two factors, a conclusive link was also found between game enjoyments and a gamer’s engagement level. Engaged gamers experience optimal enjoyment more frequently and value the importance of social interactions more than non-engaged gamers. In addition, game enjoyment can be enhanced through game design and it can also be adversely affected by real world contextual factors and technical difficulties. More importantly, the study underlines the importance of social interaction. Social interaction is the key factor that determines the level of engagement of gamers. For engaged gamers, social interaction is essential in this gaming experience. For non-engaged gamers, social interaction is not important and they have little tolerance of negative social interaction within the game.

Motion capture techniques play an important role in computer animation. Because the cost of motion capture data is relatively high and the virtual environment changes frequently in actual applications, researchers in this area focus their work on developing algorithms for editing the capture motion data, and synthesizing new motions from available motion database. Although abundant work has been done on motion editing and synthesis, few of them obviously take motion styles into consideration. Meanwhile, existing style editing algorithms either need an obvious definition of “style”, or need a time-consuming training process. In this paper, we propose a fast and convenient algorithm for human-motion style editing. We define the style of motion as statistic properties of mean and standard variance of joint quaternions in 4D unit sphere space. The proposed algorithm can transfer the style of a motion to another by transferring these properties. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach has the advantages of fast execution, low memory occupation, and easy implementation. It can be widely applied to various real-time entertainment-computing applications, such as gaming and digital movie producing.

This paper presents an efficient technique to enhance the realism of character animation by adding muscle dynamics. Focusing on the isometric contraction of muscles, the proposed algorithm takes normal mesh and clenched mesh, and uses the disparity between them to simulate the skin vibration. The skin simulation algorithm is integrated with an example-based skinning, and shows real-time performance. The proposed approach proves to be useful for animating popping dance.

Understanding of users is an important key to keep an online game fascinating to them. In this paper, we discuss a heuristic that associates relationship between users with co-occurrence of words uttered by them in a given period. An experiment is conducted using Ragnarok Online logs in the client-side of one human subject, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method based on this heuristic.

Over the last decade the importance of network games has seen a tremendous growth. A large part includes the size reduction of the handheld devices. Mobile gaming in a wireless environment and the availability to play games at any place is receiving major importance. Thus more and more games are released in this section (including a huge number of different mobile phone games).Thus, the mobile market offers a wide variety of devices, such as the new handhelds like Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. With the increase in opportunities one must first look at the user behavior to understand how to improve current problems. This paper gives an introduction into the differences of current mobile gaming platforms and their capabilities. Furthermore it features a user survey about individual preferences and social coefficients with unexpected results. The current survey system features a database to handle the huge amount of answers (the predecessor used a polling system). Concluding the results of the previous inquiry, this paper contains a lobby tool based on J2ME and C# to increase the matching mechanisms in a local environment.

In this paper we propose a model for the representation of stories in a story database. The use of such a database will enable computational story generation systems to learn from previous stories and associated user feedback, in order to create believable stories with dramatic plots that invoke an emotional response from users. Some of the distinguishing characteristics of our proposal are the inclusion of what we call ‘narratological concepts’ and user feedback in the story database.

Water rendering is one of the most computationally demanding task in computer graphics. Because of its computational complexity, real-time water rendering requires high-end hardwares. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for real-time rendering of large bodies of water such as open seas and oceans which results in an improved efficiency. Using interactive frustum, water surface can be fluidly calculated as a function of height given and interaction with another player in games. This results in an efficient yet realistic method for rendering large bodies of water without requiring as much computational power.

We have developed a prototype guide system, which was named The Forbidden City Explorer. This system has real-time information sharing functions including image data, chatting, and mutual location information. It gives priority to shared images and chats, supporting a friendly user interface and simple operation methods, especially creating shared images to be used by general people. We applied the system twice to the Forbidden City in Beijing. Users were Chinese. The results of the experiments are as follows: (1) The evaluation of the image data sharing function was timely. (2) With a simple operation, many shared images and chat messages were created.

In this paper, we investigate reinforcement learning (RL) of intelligent characters, based on neural network technology, for fighting action games. RL can be either on-policy or off-policy. We apply both schemes to learning and adaptation. The experimental results show that (1) in leaning, off-policy RL outperforms on-policy RL, but (2) in adaptation, on-policy RL outperforms off-policy RL.

This paper introduces a statistical approach for capturing enter-tainment in real-time through physiological signals within interactive playgrounds inspired by computer games. For this purpose children’s heart rate (HR) signals and judgement on entertainment are obtained from experiments on the innovative Playware playground. A comprehensive statistical analysis shows that children’s notion of entertainment correlates highly with their average HR during the game.