Video games use computers to simulate real and imagined worlds and then present them to the users to explore in as realistic and engrossing a way as possible. As such, almost anything that falls into the categories of computer vision, human cognition, network efficiency, virtual reality, human-computer interface or artificial intelligence is a potential research topic for the future of gaming. But more than realism and efficiency the driving theme of our research is what will make a game more fun. And that is where the fun, for us, begins!

Three principal themes that organize our investigation(but have undeniable regions of overlap) are the following: 1. Making realistic avatars (or NPCs, Non-Player Characters), 2. Making extensive use of the cloud for more powerful game computing, and 3. Increasing the immersivity of the gaming experience with improved means of interactivity. Some of the subtopics for each of these are:

Realistic NPCs

  • Reinforcement learning
  • Emotional voice synthesis
  • Psychology and AI
  • Intention Modeling
  • Chatbots, NLP

Cloud Enhanced Gaming

  • Latency
  • Codecs
  • Distributed computing and edge acceleration
  • Hybrid rendering
  • Computer vision, computer graphics ML

Personalized Immersion

  • Virtual and augmented reality
  • 3D display
  • 3D audio
  • Multimodal input and feedback
  • Biosensing, gaze tracking
  • Cognitive Science

Some additional topics which engage our researchers and collaborators are:

Others

  • Accessibility
  • Bias in machine learning
  • Federated learning
  • Stable diffusion, super resolution, neural radiance

Our philosophy of research collaboration in FTG is that we don’t purchase research, we participate in it. Thus, even when we are making research gifts to university laboratories we expect to work with the professors and graduate students on an equal footing. In addition, our modalities of interaction with universities is not limited to direct support of Ph.D. research. Our modalities include the following:

  • Providing funding for direct support of Ph.D. level research on topics of mutual interest
  • Collaborative research with FTG engineers where we pool our expertise with yours