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A key challenge to advance the state of the art in serious games is to facilitate instructional content creation by the domain experts. However, using games technology to support CAI poses new challenges on expert-friendly authoring tools, related to technical and cost issues. Content in games takes two different forms: multimedia and gameplay. 3D models of scenarios, objects and characters, 2D textures to dress the models, animations, music and sound effects collectively define the multimedia content of a game. Gameplay defines “what the player does”, gameplay designers build the dynamics of the game world by providing a detailed description of what the player can do and what the game has to do in response. For multimedia content creation, the solutions that the games industry are pursuing are procedural content creation and end-user content creation. For example, for the game Spore Maxis is developing procedural animation methods that allow to build new characters and automatically apply predefined animations on them. End-user content creation is becoming more popular in industry, both as a way to promote gamer attachment to the game and to profit from a mass of content creation volunteers.
This research will investigate techniques such as agent technologies and AI to provide the abstraction layers needed to create content through domain-oriented high-level languages. Machine learning techniques may serve to record in-game interactions which, once processed, can be used in a new iteration of the authoring process, incorporating the experience of running a given scenario with actual students. The research challenge is to make heavy-weight AI techniques appropriate for real-time execution constraints of 3D games that would lead to planners that can be stopped and re-started as needed, or agent-systems reasoning with multiple inconsistent logical views of the world.
Funding Notes:
Successful candidates will receive a £10000 annual stipend payable for three years and payment of tuition fees (current value £3400).
This studentship is open to Home/EU candidates with a first degree in a relevant discipline.
Non-EU students can apply, but will not receive the stipend and will be required to pay fees.
Candidates must be available to commence their studies in October 2012.
All interviews will take place during between 21st May and 8th June 2012.
Please note that this project is part of a competitive round and there is no guarantee that it will be awarded.
References:
REFERENCES
How to apply:
Postgraduate Degree by Research Applications should be completed online at http://www.uws.ac.uk/research/research-degrees/apply/
Please quote the Project Reference Number when applying.
Applications without all relevant documents will not be considered.
If you have any queries please contact Charlie Fielding on + 44 (0)141 848 3919 or email PGR@uws.ac.uk