The realistic representation of light within a computational domain is not a trivial task. Although several rendering approaches exist, the ray tracing technique is highly regarded as robust and realistic; however, its computational cost is still prohibitive for real-time games and other 3D applications. A modern tradeoff is to pair the ray tracing with the rasterization step, the former being responsible for generating complex lighting interactions, such as reflections, while the latter is used to generate less demanding visual effects, such as diffuse lighting and shadows. The stated framework has been studied by several authors, but it has not been shown to work both efficiently and accurately for highly dynamic scenes with deformable geometry. Stepping in this direction, this work presents a case study whose goal is to generate fast and realistic reflections on rigid and deformable body simulations using a hybrid approach that brings together the Screen Space technique with the GPU ray tracing algorithm and their respective main capabilities. The results show that not only realistic reflections can be generated at interactive rates, but also that the hybrid approach allows to achieve a certain level of scalability with respect to the number of triangles updated on every frame during the simulations.

Currently, there is a lack of systems development methodologies (SDMs) suitable for the development of location-based games. This research introduced a newly developed SDM to aid in the development process of location-based games, called the developmental methodology for location-based games (DMLBG). The DMLBG was based on SDMs most often used for developing mobile applications, as well as mobile and traditional games. Four case studies were used to test the DMLBG. During the case studies, independent games development teams used the DMLBG extensively to test the feasibility of the SDM. The results showed that the SDM did aid all four of the teams to successfully develop a location-based game. The teams documented the development process and gave critical feedback on their experiences. This feedback was used to revise and improve the SDM. The DMLBG addressed the lack of an SDM that is suitable for the development of location-based games.

Applications for learning and training have been developed and highlighted as important tools in health education. Despite the several approaches and initiatives, these tools have not been used in an integrated way. The specific skills approached by each application, the absence of a consensus about how to integrate them in the curricula, and the necessity of evaluation tools that standardize their utilization are the main difficulties. Considering these issues, Portal of Games and Environments Management for Designing Activities in Health (Pegadas) was designed and developed as a web portal that offers the services of organizing and sequencing serious games and virtual environments and evaluating the performance of the user in these activities. This article presents the structure of Pegadas, including the proposal of an evaluation model based on learning objectives. The results indicate its potential to collaborate with human resources training from the proposal of the sequencing, allowing a linked composition of activities and providing the reinforcement or complement of tasks and contents in a progressive scale with planned educational objective-based evaluation. These results can contribute to expand the discussions about ways to integrate the use of these applications in health curricula.

Inferring the 3D pose of a character from a drawing is a complex and under-constrained problem. Solving it may help automate various parts of an animation production pipeline such as pre-visualization. In this article, a novel way of inferring the 3D pose from a monocular 2D sketch is proposed. The proposed method does not make any external assumptions about the model, allowing it to be used on different types of characters. The inference of the 3D pose is formulated as an optimization problem and a parallel variation of the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm called PARAC-LOAPSO is utilized for searching the minimum. Testing in isolation as well as part of a larger scene, the presented method is evaluated by posing a lamp, a horse, and a human character. The results show that this method is robust, highly scalable, and able to be extended to various types of models.

In this paper we describe an approach for developing an intelligent game master (GM) for computer role-playing games. The role of the GM is to set up the game environment, manage the narrative ow and enforce the game rules whilst keeping the players engaged. Our approach is to use the popular Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model of agents to developing a GM. We describe the process for creating such a GM and how we implemented a prototype of it for a scenario in the Neverwinter Nights (NWN) game. We describe the evaluation of our prototype with human participants who played the chosen NWN scenario both with and without the BDI GM. The comparison survey completed by the participants shows that the system with the BDI GM was the clear winner with respect to game replayability, flexibility, objective setting and overall interest; thus, validating our hypothesis that a BDI GM will provide game players with a better gaming experience.

The field of computational creativity, including musical metacreation, strives to develop artificial systems that are capable of demonstrating creative behavior or producing creative artefacts. But the claim of creativity is often assessed, subjectively only on the part of the researcher and not objectively at all. This article provides theoretical motivation for more systematic evaluation of musical metacreation and computationally creative systems and presents an overview of current methods used to assess human and machine creativity that may be adapted for this purpose. In order to highlight the need for a varied set of evaluation tools, a distinction is drawn among three types of creative systems: those that are purely generative, those that contain internal or external feedback, and those that are capable of reflection and self-reflection. To address the evaluation of each of these aspects, concrete examples of methods and techniques are suggested to help researchers (1) evaluate their systems' creative process and generated artefacts, and test their impact on the perceptual, cognitive, and affective states of the audience, and (2) build mechanisms for reflection into the creative system, including models of human perception and cognition, to endow creative systems with internal evaluative mechanisms to drive self-reflective processes. The first type of evaluation can be considered external to the creative system and may be employed by the researcher to both better understand the efficacy of their system and its impact and to incorporate feedback into the system. Here we take the stance that understanding human creativity can lend insight to computational approaches, and knowledge of how humans perceive creative systems and their output can be incorporated into artificial agents as feedback to provide a sense of how a creation will impact the audience. The second type centers around internal evaluation, in which the system is able to reason about its own behavior and generated output. We argue that creative behavior cannot occur without feedback and reflection by the creative/metacreative system itself. More rigorous empirical testing will allow computational and metacreative systems to become more creative by definition and can be used to demonstrate the impact and novelty of particular approaches.

Musical duets are a type of creative partnership with a long history of artistic practice. What can they tell us about creative partnerships between a human and a computer? To explore this question, we implemented an activity-based model of duet interaction in software designed to support musical metacreation and investigated the experience of performing with it. The activity-based model allowed for the application of reflexive interactive processes, previously used in dialogic interaction, to a synchronous musical performance context. The experience of improvising with the computational agent was evaluated by expert musicians, who reported that interactions were fun, engaging, and challenging, despite some obvious limitations in the musical sophistication of the software. These findings reinforce the idea that even simple metacreative systems can stimulate creative partnerships and, further, that creative human-machine duet partnerships may well produce, like human-human duet partnerships, more than the sum of their parts.

Musical metacreation (MuMe), also known as musical computational creativity, is a subfield of computational creativity that focuses on endowing machines with the ability to achieve creative musical tasks, such as composition, interpretation, improvisation, accompaniment, mixing, etc. It covers all dimensions of the theory and practice of computational generative music systems, ranging from purely artistic approaches to purely scientific ones, inclusive of discourses relevant to this topic from the humanities. MuMe systems range from purely generative ones to a variety of interactive systems, such as those for computer-assisted composition and computer-assisted sound design. In order to better appreciate the many dimensions of this interdisciplinary domain and see how it overlaps and differs from research in computer music, this introduction provides a general entry point. After defining and introducing the domain, its context, and some of its terminology, we reflect on some challenges and opportunities for the field as a whole.

Electric Agents is a transmedia game that presents new ways for children to actively engage with television content. A typical-looking educational television show transforms into an interactive game in which children collaborate through a mobile augmented reality experience to find and collect vocabulary words that are missing from the show. The players return the words to the show by throwing them back into the television using their mobile devices. This blend of a linear video narrative and an interactive game strives to make educational television content more engaging and participatory while fostering collaborative play with vocabulary words. We describe the technical implementation to support this collaborative mobile augmented reality experience and report findings from a pilot user study. Results demonstrate patterns of collaborative activity, scaffolded learning, and parasocial relationships that have been linked in previous literature to educational benefits.

Computer-based games have become an important social phenomenon of modern society. Fast-growing online games are becoming the dominant sector in computer-based games. The development of online games involves many disparate disciplines from the technology, entertainment, and behavior sciences. Attracted by the potential impact of this rapidly growing segment, there is a growing literature addressing this fascinating topic. However, the scope, perspective, and main research themes of online games study are still unclear to date. Therefore, we utilized the intellectual structure technique developed by the information scientist to help clarify the scope and themes of this research domain. We analyzed thousands of relevant literature and tentatively identified 25 main research themes to facilitate the comprehension and study of online games. A research framework is developed by synthesizing the research themes and references. The framework encompasses research areas in network infrastructure, game platform architecture, game applications, player study, ICT mediated social activities, social capital, and game business models.