Looking for something interesting to do in your Project unit, or perhaps for your Honours year, maybe even your spare time? Below are some of our projects and we are always on the lookout for good artists, programmers and designers.

The aim of the Exergaming project is to combine the addictiveness of video games with the health benefits of exercise. Projects in this area include the following:

• Physiologically Controlled Game Mechanic Design: The aim of this project is to design and produce a game aimed at giving the player their required dose of exercise. The aim of the game will be to keep the player at their target heart rate for a required period of time by changing gameplay and physical resistance of the exercise.
• Implicitly Controlled Game Mechanic Design: Put simply, create a game that can adjust to the players physical condition without measuring heart rate. Factors such as speed, accuracy, and duration of play can be used to estimate how tired the player is and adjust gameplay accordingly.
• Are they being entertained? Exercise is only half of the equation, the other being entertainment. This project seeks to take a webcam and use existing algorithms for face image processing to determine how bored the player is getting.
• AI for Exergame Opponents: The role of traditional Game Opponent AI is to die in a fun way for the player. An additional criterion for an Exergame opponent is to keep the player active in the process. This project will investigate the adapatation of existing AI opponents for exercise purposes.

Networking Wireless Games

This project involves analysing the traffic between wireless consoles including the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. Using various network analysis software the importance of different packets can be determined - with such a model, appropriate network transmission protocols can be recomeneded, or a new one devised.

Evolving Virtual Character Control

Manually creating animations for computer game characters is a tedious process. Combining the animation data with a physics engine allows for interactive animation, greatly enhancing the range of motions an animator can produce in a reduced amount of time. This project is focused on how the control system for a physically animated character can best be evolved for a range of desired motions and behaviours.

Physics Serialization

Storing, exchanging and streaming digital assets between various graphics application is largely a solved problem. However, this is not the case for physically based animations and models. Recently SONY proposed the COLLADA standard for physics and graphics data exchange. This new format needs to be evaluated in the context of various physical simulation subsystems and how this data can be intelligently streamed over a network.

Critical Infrastructure Simulation

Visualizing and understanding the impacts of the loss of critical infrastructure is a complex task. Network based modelling of the critical infrastructure allows a mathematical model to be built representing the probability of failure of critical infrastrucutre. This project focuses on the development of a virtual 3D environment for simulating the effects of power, water and computer network failures.

GPU Compiler Technology

Modern consumer graphics cards can perform far more floating point computations (FLOPS) than consumer CPU's. However, programming these graphics cards requires a new programming paradigm: stream computing. nVidia have developed a language, “CUDA” for programming their graphics cards, and AMD have developed “Brook+”. As a result, programs targeting both technologies must be written twice. This project will develop a cross-compiler capable of re-targeting a GPU application to either language.

Automotive Image Processing

Driver Assistance Systems (DAS) prevent accidents on our roads. Over 60% of serious accidents on Australian roads are a result of drivers unintentionally leaving their lane. A lane departure warning system can provide warnings to alert drivers if they are unintentionally leaving a lane. This project will develop and evaluate lane tracking, collision avoidance, and vehicle tracking algorithms suitable for embedded systems.

One Button Gaming

People afflicted by paralysis and conditions such as Cerebral Palsy have a limited range of muscle control at their disposal - sometimes limiting their interaction with computers to a single button. This project aims to implement a scanning interface operated by a single button which will allow turn-based board and card games to be played.

The interface will be implemented as an extention to an existing open-source game framework and work on the principle of scanning - where choices are cycled through and the button is pressed when the desired choice is selected.

The industry partner for this project is Next Challenge.

Online Card Game

Our industry partner for this project is a publisher who have in their portfolio a successfull paper-based card game sold world-wide. The aim of the project is to develop an online version which lets people play together remotely.