Please refer to Creativity and Cognition Studios web page for additional research areas and PhD projects.
Please refer to FIT research on courses, supervision, applying, scholarship information and general queries on Masters and PhD programmes.
As with all web pages, the list of projects listed here become "old" soon after they are entered. Contact me directly for the "latest and the greatest" projects as well as to "pitch" your own project. A good pitch should have a timeline, concrete deliverables and build on previous work, something more substantial than "I want to make a game".
Please refer to the subject page for official information on this subject.
Path Finding: Path-finding continues to be troublesome for most games. Good path-finding algorithms are necessary for NPCs to move around in a world. Hierarchical Path-Finding A* is the current state of the art for grid based maps. For this project, you will build a program that can read a map, use HPA* to create a plan to move from start to goal location, and evaluate the performance of the algorithm under different conditions. The maps can be actual game maps or generated randomly. For an outstanding project, the program should include an interface that allows the user to select start/goal locations and include visualisation of the states explored. The project can be completed in a language of your choice. Variations: dynamic environment with moving objects, importance on "starting to move quickly" rather than finding the perfect plan, path-smoothing algorithms for "natural" paths, ...
Finite State Machines:Design a GUI to help in creating FSMs. The article from Phil Carlisle in AI Wisdom would be a good starting point. For an outstanding project, the program should allow new "tests" to be incorporated easily, generate human-readable scripts and have a second program run a simulation based on the scripts.
Virtual Tour: Build an accurate model of Building 10 that can be browsed. You would preferrably have previous experience with designing levels. You will complete a short survey of available engines/environments for modeling it and document throughly your process for creating an accurate, realistics 3D model. Sending email by going to a person's office and other interactive components can also be added.
Physics Modeling: Accurate physics modeling can be very difficult. For this project you will accurately model how blocks fall and slide and build a visualisation component for it. The program should read a configuration of blocks and show how they would fall, hit and bounce from each other. More advanced components such as elasticity and modeling jumping can be incorporated for an outstanding project.
Flocking and Herding: Flocking and herding are some of the common group behaviours found in games. A basic implementation would provide a visualisation, an outstanding implementation would provide an interactive environment for testing these behaviours and adjusting their parameters.
Environment mapping: Accurately modeling reflection has always been one of the goals of computer graphics. For liquids, this can be harder as the image is both refracted and reflected. Build a model for visualising the reflection from different fluids. An outstanding project would incorporate complex, dynamic environments and ripple effects of the liquid.
Self-Shadows: Implementing self-shadowing where a dynamic object casts a shadow on itself is difficult because it has to be done in real-time with highly detailed characters. Implement a program to demonstrate self-shadows for a character. An outstanding program would incorporate multiple characters and multiple shadows.
Priority Based Scheduler: Game characters have to be updated as necessary. The priority and the frequency of the updates is determined by the importance of the object (monster NPC versus decorations) as well as the location of the player. Implement a system that is able to manage priority schedules with objects being added and removed dynamically. An outstanding project would analyse the performance of such system under heavy load. Depending on your approach, there may or may not be a visual component for this project.
Terrain Analysis: In complex terrains characters can get stuck. Develop a method to analyse a 3D terrain to identify locations where characters could get stuck. A complimentary system would also help users unstuck their characters.
more coming soon....
The honours program gives you a chance to pursue an area of your interest in depth. It opens the possibilities for postgraduate research degrees and can provide you with a large project you can show to potential employers. But most importantly, your honours year should be fun, lots of hard work but fun!
The below projects are intended to give you an idea about the types of projects I supervise and to serve as a starting point for our discussion if you want to work with me. I am open to other project ideas, contact me by email with a project proposal if you think it falls under my research areas.
Scholarships: The Faculty provides a $3000 summer vacation scholarship for students who want to start their honours work over the summer and $5000 scholarship for all honours students. Please contact Robert Rist rist@it.uts.edu.au for general honours inquiries.
Facilities/Research Environment: As an honours student working with me, you will be part of the .Creativity and Cognition Studios. research group. You will have access to the CCS Studios, attend weekly meetings and regularly interact with other research students and staff.
Plan based behaviour: The behaviour of most NPCs is scripted, rule-based or finite-state based. Plan generation can offer novel action sequences that were not anticipated at game design time. You will examine the .Mimesis. system developed at North Carolina University and either develop a similar system from scratch or build an extension for it. Extend an existing game engine: Build an extension to an existing game engine (FLY3D/OGRE/.) that implements some of the recent ideas from the literature.
Holodeck: Books and movies provide linear, static stories. We are now on the verge of a developing new story form, interactive stories, where the user is an active participant. The current experiments in this area have been in the form of branching storylines, similar to .choose your own adventure. books from 1970s, and hypertext experiments. Balancing the author.s control over a story and the freedom of the user is a fine balance. The ultimate goal would be to create the holodeck from Star Trek, where characters dynamically react to the user and the story unfolds in unexpected ways. As a part of this project, you can create a text-based virtual theatre where different agents interact with each other and the user, a 3D environment where the user interacts with different characters, create a interactive story generator, build a graphical interface for authoring branching storylines, create agents that can be directed in the same way actors and actresses can to easily create visual stories, or examine a specific technology that is critical for interactive storytelling such as limited natural language understanding, dynamic lighting of 3D scenes, etc.
Emotional Agent: Emotions make characters real, but to date emotional state of an agent has been either ignored or if implemented has been separate from the agent.s decision process. Starting from a cognitive theory of emotions, you will build a model of agent emotions and how those emotions change over time and affect the agent.s goals and decisions. Time permitting, we will compare the believability of an agent with and without emotions under different circumstances.
Collaborative filtering offers a solution where an email is tagged as SPAM based on 'votes' from users. Each user can implicitly or explicitly define their network of trust in other users' judgement of tagging to filter their own SPAM. Users in this system do not necessarily have to be humans, but can be intelligent agents that use a variety of methods in classifying email.
The goal of this project is to leverage of the existing efforts and expand them in the area of collaborative filtering by 1) providing an easy to use plugin to popular mail clients (such as outlook and Eudora) 2) building web services for clients to query and report suspected SPAM 3) extending mail clients to use PGP or other encryption technique to encrypt and sign emails automatically for the purpose of preventing spam rather than security 4) implement intelligent agents that can contribute to the collaborative filtering process.
Research Question: "What are the potentials for augmented artifacts and user interaction in mixed-reality environments"? Augmented Typography.: (A possible starting point for investigation)
Physical space: Questions and statements (quotes) pertaining to mixed reality issues are mapped in the physical installation environment. Either through the use of actual lettering applied to gallery surfaces (walls ceiling and floor), or through the creation of 3 dimensional artifacts with typographic surfaces.
Virtual space: Through the use of wireless, augmented reality 3d stereoscopic glasses, additional content can be accessed. This extra information will relate to the physical typographical statements and take the form of short video sequences and expanded textural analysis. The virtual content will be triggered by the user looking at interactive nodes incorporated in the terrestrial texts and will be mapped into 3d dimensional space as dynamic audio and visual - animated type and video sequences.
One page flyer about the project.
If you would like to work with me, you should check out my .Resources for Student. http://staff.it.uts.edu.au/~ypisan/research/studentresources/. It provides some general resources and has a list of do.s and don.ts that will help you.