Digital Media

4GAMES: Digital content for serious games: creation, management, rendering and interaction

4GAMES applies videogame and graphics technologies to the creation, management and display of digital content and interaction techniques. These technologies improve the automatic creation of virtual worlds, graphics realism and interaction techniques.  They are applied to develop serious games for education and training.

Serious games are not precisely defined, though this concept is generally used to qualify games specifically designed to serve an additional purpose to that of pure entertainment. This purpose often refers to attaining specific learning outcomes, psychological or physical stimulation or skill by education, advertising, training or simulation. Serious games can be of any genre, use any game technology, and be developed for any platform. However, there are still many open issues that require thorough research to allow the development and the utilization of videogames for education and serious gaming. These issues encourage exploring topics like how to take advantage of the videogames inherent adaptation behaviour to maximize the effectiveness of the learning experiences or to develop mechanisms to track and evaluate the performance of the students when they use these learning tools. Also, it is necessary to further elaborate game-based learning architectures for the delivery and distribution of the games.

At the same time the technological challenge is enormous and the expectations of industry and consumers are still far from being satisfied. Thus new advances in this field attained through technological research are required. In this direction, the proposed Project deals with different aspects related to the design and development of serious games covering the whole pipeline of creation of a serious game, including: the automatic creation of virtual worlds, the improvement in realism in its rendering, the management of contents and the interaction with the user. It will also be investigated, how well the serious game concepts can be brought to mobile devices, given the improved processing power of recent mart phones, their ubiquity and fewer nuisances. The improvements in this Project will be demonstrated in the development of several serious games in fields like business, education and learning, social networks, geographic information systems, cultural heritage and medical applications.