SciTechBits – Interesting Bits of Science & Technoglogy Served For You!

You buy a new game and the first step you meet with your game play is the “difficulty” setting. You pick the best estimated difficulty and start playing, to only realize later that this setting is either too easy or too tough. Ever felt, “I wish there was a setting between easy and medium”? Can walkthroughs be made obsolete?


Few games (Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Lego Star Wars II) have tried to handle situations like above by making the game harder according to the gamers success, however they do not respond to specific advanced skill sets possesed by the player or the lack of.

Most non player characters (NPCs) are built with a very limited set of capabilities and navigation. A different or unconventional approach used by a gamer often leaves NPCs lost. For example, in several FPS, advanced gamers would seek a good & safe vantage point which attracts a good number of opponents (NPCs) to take them down off-guard (spawn camping, sniping etc). Gamers engage in this as they see a lot of opponents in the vicinity, they have got a good vantage point and they are sure that the AI of the game would keep sending almost all of the NPCs in the vicinity (in most cases through the same path). How interesting would the game be, if the AI was able to detect that the gamer now has a vantage point, lure him into a different/difficult location rather than sending more NPCs. Considering a novice gamer who lands up with no ammunition very quickly, if the AI could see that the gamer was wasting way too much ammunition, control the power of the autonomous weapons to limit the ammunition wastage when there is no NPC in clear view and thus lessen the frustration the gamer would experience.

Researchers have demonstrated that with minimum efforts and skill, teachers can create educational serious games, by just modding existing first person shooter games, which are very popular among students. Students who tested felt that, this could be used in high schools, however male testers reacted different as compared to female testers.

Gaming technology has been heavily focused on “entertainment games”, while the other type of games – “serious games”, are heavily ignored mainly due to the less monetary profit got from them. Educational serious games, whose purpose is to be educative, have been characterized with realistic activities, such as performing experiments in a laboratory or the like. However the games as such do not offer anything interesting (other than education) as compared to the entertainment games, especially first person shooters. First person shooters are very popular among students and are usually very task/mission oriented. Teachers and researchers have been hoping to tap into this interest among students towards the first person shooters, to use them for educative purposes.

However, game development is not an easy task and involves heavy resources, which makes it almost impossible for teachers to handle with. A group of researchers saw this need and decided to try to mod an existing game and test the efficiency. Unreal Tournament is already popular among the research community and has been analyzed for it physics capabilities, suggesting that UnrealEd (the map editor of the game) could be used in classrooms to demonstrate various physics theories and properties.

Researchers have designed a virtual reality based piano, which can be used to train stroke survivor’s finger motion. The piano actively engages the patient and slowly makes them produce more degrees of motion.

Stroke is the largest cause of long term disability in America and affects about 5.7 million people. Only 5% of them are able to regain their hand & finger controls. While some stroke survivors experience hemiplegia – which is the total impairment of one side of their body, some survivors experience hemiparesis – which is weakness in one side of the body. A system designed to produce hand & finger motion, in a continuous and interactive manner and thus making the target skill level progressively higher is proved to avail better and quicker rehabilitation of the hands & fingers.

With these in mind, a group of researchers from New Jersey have designed a “Virtual Piano Trainer” to provider finger motion training for people with hemiparesis. The system comprises of a screen – which shows a first person view of an avatar playing a 64 keys keyboard, a glove fitted over both hands – which can read every fine movement produced in the hands & fingers, an arm tracking device over both the arms and a haptic feedback & exoskeletal device over the dorsum of the hand (on top of the gloves) – which is capable of producing a force on each finger to either cause resistance or motion.

A group of researchers are reporting on a new setup, which could finally result in every facial expression made by a gamer be cloned to the avatars face. The results produced by this method are truly amazing. Commercialization of this could be a big change in multiplayer game’s immersiveness.

Immersiveness has played a significant role in games development over the recent times. Game producers have engaged every possible technique to make the gamers feel deeply involved with the game. Customization of the gaming character (avatar) is one such method, where in the gamer feels more involved when the avatar has been customized to look like him/her or to his/her liking.

Multiplayer games have taken gaming to the next level, as the gamers get to compete with real people in real time. Most multiplayer games include chat, emoticons and VOIP for letting the gamers exchange their emotions/feelings over the game. Consider one gamer wearing extra strong body armor is being shot by an enemy with a very tiny gun. Chat, emoticons or VOIP could not really carry over the expressions or emotions of these players, would it not be awesome to see the player (avatar) being shot – laughing hard in this situation. This should be possible very soon, as a group of researchers have designed a setup which makes this possible.