Research Partners and Collaboration Creative Technology

With a mission statement aimed at identifying, collecting, testing and distributing good practice in game-based learning, this project aims to produce a framework of game-based learning pedagogy targeted at teachers and trainers. This resulting framework will empower them to design learning environments and teaching methods which are more creative, innovative, motivating and ultimately engaging by including video gaming elements. This project was supported by the EU Leonardo Transfer of Innovation Fund (part of the Lifelong Learning Programme). In collaboration with other EU partners GameiT attracted 250,000 Euros of funding.

Project Holders and Collaborators: Dr Christos Gatzidis

This project, titled GameWise, concentrates on the European Commission's recent acknowledgment of the need to pay more attention to new ways of unlocking Europe's potentials of cultural and creative industries (CCIs). For Europe and other parts of the world, the rapid rollout of new technologies and increased globalisation has meant a striking shift away from traditional manufacturing towards services and innovation. Factory floors are progressively being replaced by creative communities, whose raw material is their ability to imagine, create and innovate. In this new digital economy, immaterial value increasingly determines material value, as consumers are looking for new and enriching "experiences". The ability to create social experiences and networking is now a factor of competitiveness. The production of video games is central in this relation. These last years, the game industry has been on a fast track to become the world's leading entertainment business. The majority of the production is, however, placed primarily in North America - and the focus is on games designed only for entertainment purposes. But a new way of doing business is on the rise: games made for other purposes than mere entertainment. The general term for this category of games is 'serious games', although also often referred to as applied gaming or gamification. This project is then set to attempt to transfer the related to the above results that have been made under individual partners involved to the rest of the partnership and thus explore the creation of new jobs in Europe by the transfer and adaptation of a model for closer cooperation between VET (Vocational Education and Training) institutions and the surrounding world of work. The total funds attracted are 250,000 Euros under the Leonardo Transfer of Innovation scheme.

Project Holders and Collaborators: Dr Christos Gatzidis

This project ims to establish an international collaborative platform to create and stimulate business and technology expertise in producing animation-based mobile content marketable in the UK and Japan. Employing an action-based research strategy, we are collaborating with two prominent Japanese Universities in the areas of mobile consumer behaviour and animation technology. Also, this project will serve as a multidisciplinary platform to facilitate a fusion of academic expertise between the domains of animation technology, culture-based animation creation, mobile-mediated consumer behaviour and mobile-mediated service development highly favourable for research, education and commercial purposes.

Project Holders and Collaborators: Dr Feng Tian
Dr Lukman Araeon (Business School)
Professor Shigeo Morishima (Waseda University, Japan)
Professor Shugo (International University of Japan)

Healthcare is an important marketplace for emerging technologies and virtual reality (VR) technology has revolutionized the global healthcare industry. The aim of this project is to investigate novel approaches on modeling and visualization of the vascular network of a human being for the creation of a surgical environment for medical training.

Project Holders and Collaborators: Dr Feng Tian
Dr Sylvain Brandel (Lyon University 1, Lyon, Frane)

Emotion is an important aspect of communication, both between individuals and within written documents. This project aims to provide non-verbal cues of emotion to support remote text-based communications. We have built a real-time text-to-emotion extraction engine to analyse text and identify the intensity of the contained emotions. Emotional momentum is modelled to resolve ambiguity or conflicting emotional content. Appropriate expressive images/3D models are created from a single image/default model. Applications include Internet Chat, Games and Virtual Theatres. Further information can be gathered by analysing the emotional content of whole documents e.g. the "mood" of the stock market has been assessed from newspaper articles in order to predict the future movement of share prices.

Project Holders and Collaborators: Dr David John
Anthony C. Boucouvalas (University of Peleponnese, Greece)

Animation has the potential for job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property according to the UK Creative Industries Task Force. However, traditional animation is a labor intensive and time consuming process. Animators have to spend hours at the drawing board tracing, sketching, and coloring each frame. This process can easily take more than 60% of the entire production time.

The labor intensive nature of the work has resulted in much of the outsource market shifting to developing countries where wages and living standard are low. The proposal will bring to the existing palette of animation technology an innovative framework that cuts time and cost of production significantly, allowing more time and effort for creative development. We are collaborating in this project with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and Waseda University in Japan.

Healthcare is an important marketplace for emerging technologies, and the virtual reality (VR) technology has revolutionized the global healthcare industry. Since 2000 the VR applications in surgery, medical education & training have experienced double-digit growth worldwide. Still however exist some technical obstacles, of which the realistic modeling of tissue objects that are fully responsive to surgical manipulations is the most challenging.

Our aim is to investigate novel approaches on modeling and visualization of vascular network of human being in creating a realistic surgical environment for medical training. Start from modeling the vessels of liver and cerebral vascular, we gradually extend to other tissues. In a long run our aspiration is to integrate and complement our ideas to bid big research grants to develop a high-fidelity VR simulation system in clinical training to honing medical practitioner's skills and improve patient safety, making quality-of-life for all. We are collaborating in this project Beijing Normal University in China, with a grant supported from Royal Society.

Being built on a previous research model for teaching called VITAE, this project, called Game-iT, extends VITAE by deploying learning methods based on Kolb's learning circle and ICT. New Web 2.0 tools in particular will be employed in order to enable game-based learning. Teaching materials for the pilot test runs and subsequent courses will be developed in order to demonstrate the benefits of using game-based learning.

We aim this research to enable higher education institutions to integrate creative technologies into their other ICT platforms such as student portals and virtual learning environments. After the project there will be an electronic learning platform in the partner countries through which parts of the courses will be delivered. This will also contain support mechanisms for academics, including a hotline, FAQs and learning resource database. This project is supported by the EU Leonardo Transfer of Innovation Fund, with collaboration with other EU partners.

This project is to provide some non-verbal cues that are present in face-to-face conversations that are not available within Internet Communication without using audio or video. We will build a prototype that analyses text that is input by users, and extract the emotion and display an appropriate expressive image. During the development we are going to investigate methods of modelling emotion to to resolve ambiguity or conflicting emotional content that occur within individual sentences.

Technology has had an enormous effect on the way we live our lives and the speed at which we can communicate and do things. Yet rather than use the extra time we gain to relax and contemplate life we seem to fill the time with more activity. The RSM project uses live snails inhabiting a tank on the BU campus to carry electronic messages. The snails are fitted with tiny capsules that hold radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips.

As the snails pass within range of an electronic ‘leader’ positioned within the tank, the emails will ‘attach’ themselves to the chips. The emails will only be sent to their final destinations once the snails pass close to a second reader which will then forward the messages. This project is one of our collaborations with Media School in Bournemouth University. It is presented as part of the ‘Slow Art’ category at SIGGRAPH 2008.