Research

Since 2015, I’ve worked on a variety of research projects that I’d retrospectively say were all related to the future of augmented reality, and particularly head mounted displays for augmented reality. I’ve recently started shifting my research focus to a new area, so I figured this would be a good time to post a retrospective of what I’ve done and what I feel I’ve learned over these last 3 years.

I’ve recently been spending a lot of my time working on projects based on the G3D Innovation Engine by Morgan McGuire. I personally learned how to program using unix development tools, so I’m used to using the command line for everything, and Makefiles are the build tool I’m most comfortable with. G3D, being a research game engine, primarily for graphics research, has had to focus on Windows-based development for a number of years now.

Today I submitted a technical report done by my students over the last academic year. It took a while to get the write-up to the level of quality that I felt good about submitting it, but now that it’s there, I figured I should push it out. I used arXiv to post it since they make it easy to publish a technical report while not preventing you from submitting the work to another venue such as a conference or journal at a later date.

I’ve been thinking recently about the kinds of things I’d like to work on most during the break from teaching, and I’ve decided that I really want to take a deep look at game design from a theoretical and practical standpoint. It seems to me that there could be some need for a more formal and methodological approach to the design of games than currently exists. In my experience, game designers (the ones that put the fun into the game) are hard to find and extremely hard to train.

Over the last year, I advised 5 undergraduate students on a couple research projects. One of them included the development of tutorials and lab assignments for a new class, but didn’t have a goal of publishing an academic paper. This student did a good job, and added on a persistance of vision display to a combat robot’s spinning arm that wouldn’t have otherwise been there. The other main project involved the rest of my research students.