Princeton Review&rsquo;s Top 25 Graduate Schools to Study Game Design for 2016 
On March 15, 2016, the Princeton Review released its seventh annual ranking lists naming the best undergraduate and graduate schools for students to study - and launch a career in - game design. UIC made the list of the top 25 graduate schools to study game design. The selection was based on a survey it conducted in 2015 of administrators at 150 institutions offering game design coursework and/or degrees in the U.S., Canada and some countries abroad. 
The selection and ranking of schools was based on criteria that broadly covered the quality of the faculty, facilities and technology. The Princeton Review also factored in data it collected from the schools on their curriculum and career services. 
The UIC Computer Science Department has been teaching &ldquo;Video Game Design and Development&rdquo; for over a decade, and in 2014 and 2015, it was taught by UIC alumnus and adjunct instructor of computer science, Mark Tulewicz, a game developer who previously worked at Incredible Technologies in the Chicagoland area, and is now a software developer at Amazon Game Studios. Tulewicz taught the course at both at UIC and, with co-instructor Kevin Cherry, at Louisiana State University (LSU) using video conferencing. Students were organized into virtual teams, and each team had to design and develop a video game as its class project, which were then judged in a formal setting. Students learned to balance real-world deadlines while working with classmates who were thousands of miles away. The course was meant to mimic the challenges faced by many startup indie game developers. 
The Princeton Review has reported its game design program rankings annually since 2010. It has teamed up with PC Gamer, a monthly magazine published by Future plc, as its reporting partner on this project since 2013. PC Gamer&rsquo;s May issue will have a feature on the ranking lists that details the schools&rsquo; unique programs, prominent professors, and alumni. 
More information on the Princeton Review&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings/game-design">&ldquo;Top 25 Graduate Schools to Study Game Design for 2016.&rdquo;</a> 
This is not the first time Princeton Review acknowledged UIC&rsquo;s video game course. In 2010, UIC was rated one of the top undergraduate game design programs in the U.S. and Canada. (Note that the course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.) Jason Leigh, then a UIC Computer Science professor, <a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=947">started this course</a> and taught it for many years.

This montage shows stills from the student-developed projects done for the &ldquo;Video Game Design and Development&rdquo; computer science course, taught by Mark Tulewicz at UIC in collaboration with Louisiana State University, in 2014 and 2015.

Princeton Review rates UIC one of the top 25 graduate schools to study game design

Google Street View can be considered as an online browsable dataset consisting of billions of street-level panoramic images acquired all around the world. Since 2007, the company has continuously improved and updated its global image database, now collecting on average one panorama each 5-10m in urban environments. Google provides public APIs for requesting virtual camera views of a given panorama from its GPS position or unique identifier. These views are rectilinear projection of the spherical panorama with a user selected field of view, orientation and elevation angle. These views can be considered as undistorted images taken from pinhole cameras, free of distortion, and need to be partially overlapped in order to reconstruct the 360 degree panorama. 
Additionally, the speed with which Google&rsquo;s laser scanners get reflected by surfaces allows the company to calculate the distance from the camera to objects or buildings, allowing the creation of 3D models to be used in other applications such as Google Earth. Google API indeed provides a way to obtain the depth map corresponding to a specific panorama, information that we will exploit in order to reconstruct the 3D scene. Once decoded and visualized in space, this depth data and the models generated from it may turn out to be useful for many different applications like navigation and augmented reality, but also virtual reality oriented videogames.

Sample point cloud reconstruction based on the output of merging 6 different panoramic images along a street.

3D City Reconstruction From Google Street View

Despite laser scan 3D point cloud acquisition has greatly improved over the next few years, the process of creating 3D large scale city models is still quite expensive and not straightforward. At the same time, nowadays services such as Google Street View provide a vast amount of geo-registered panoramic imagery, guaranteeing a decent resolution for dense locations at zero cost. Our idea is indeed to leverage this free information provided by Google Street View in order to obtain a cheap and automatizable 3D reconstruction of an urban area, by extracting the depth information related to the great number of panoramic images available online. 
ACM Classification Keywords 
H.5.m. Graphical user interfaces; Computer Graphics; Visualization 
Author Keywords 
Google Street View; Point Clouds; 3D reconstruction

Combination of multiple panoramas along a street.

Arthur Nishimoto, a PhD student in the UIC Computer Science Department and a Research Assistant at the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), is a recipient of the 2016 UIC Chancellor&rsquo;s Student Service Award. He will be honored, along with other students who have made exceptional contributions to the campus, at the 44th Annual Chancellor&rsquo;s Student Service and Leadership Awards (CSSLA) Ceremony this evening. 
The CSSLA recognizes outstanding student leaders and student volunteers who, while maintaining high academic achievement, demonstrate a commitment to the UIC community through participation in student organizations and campus activities and throughout the greater Chicagoland area through active service and community engagement. 
Nishimoto was recommended by Professor Daria Tsoupikova, Associate Professor of Design Technology in the UIC College of Architecture, Design and the Arts, and an EVL faculty member. While Nishimoto has been collaborating with Tsoupikova for several years on several virtual-reality art projects, most recently &ldquo;Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project,&rdquo; she recommended him for this award based on his long-term contributions to the success of EVL, the Computer Science Department and to UIC. Specifically, she noted his &ldquo;competence, creativity, personal initiative, commitment to his work, dedication to the success of the Lab, Department and University, as well as his research and academic achievements.&rdquo; 
Among Nishimoto&rsquo;s extracurricular activities, he was a member of the student delegation sent to Washington DC to present the UIC Obama Presidential Library Proposal to Congressional staffers; he converted architectural plans for a new UIC College of Engineering building into the CAVE2 virtual environment; he developed a procedure to port interactive 3D programs written in the Unity programming language into the CAVE2 environment, which is now used in several computer science courses; he has mentored many EVL undergraduates; he never tires of assisting EVL with numerous demos and tours; and, his virtual-reality tribute to the Star Trek Enterprise, developed in his spare time, is a major highlight of EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2 demos. Also, Nishimoto has received Honorable Mention in the 2014 and 2011 UIC Graduate College&rsquo;s Image of Research contests for his work on graphical user interfaces and on a multi-user electronic paint program.

Arthur Nishimoto stands in front of EVL’s Cyber-Commons that is running his video game &ldquo;Fleet Commander,&rdquo; an homage to the epic battles in Star Wars&rsquo; Return of the Jedi.

UIC CS/EVL PhD student Arthur Nishimoto receives 2016 UIC Chancellor's Student Service Award

Newcity magazine is Chicago&rsquo;s only locally owned and operated cultural weekly, and has been covering Chicago&rsquo;s local scene for more than 25 years. It&rsquo;s current &ldquo;Best of Chicago&rdquo; issue just came out (Volume 31, No. 1359). The section on City Life lists many best things about Chicago, including &ldquo;Best place to get your geek on.&rdquo; Um, that would be the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago! The article is reproduced below. 
* * * * * * * * * * 
Best place to get your geek on 
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at UIC 
Cutting-edge research meets a massive wall made out of small screens that would make any hardcore videogame fan scream and a literal cave that opens up a highly immersive, surround-screen, surround-sound, virtual reality environment at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The lab brings together academics, designers, engineers, artists and mad scientists using technologies that bend reality off into unimaginable directions. EVL is the place where visualization, virtual reality and real-time interactive computer graphics are born. As if that were not enough, it was here that the computer graphics for the first &ldquo;Star Wars&rdquo; film were created in 1976. How cool is that? 
UIC College of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, 842 W. Taylor 
Best of Chicago 2016

Best of Chicago 2016

Newcity magazine rates UIC/EVL as &ldquo;Best place to get your geek on&rdquo;

CHICAGO - VGA announces its &rdquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&ldquo; exhibition, public program and catalogue, in partnership with Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago November 1-December 15, 2018. This expansive project chronicles the under-recognized story of Chicago&rsquo;s contributions to new media art by artists at the University of Illinois at Chicago's (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and at Midway and Bally games from 1973-1992. Chicago New Media 1973-1992 will feature video game artifacts, new media technologies, historical photographs, game stills, playable video game consoles, and virtual reality modules. 
The exhibit, public program and catalogue are organized by VGA Gallery in partnership with Gallery 400 and the EVL. It is curated by SAIC Associate Professor of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, Jon Cates with curatorial assistance by VGA Director of
Exhibitions and Programs Chaz Evans and Executive Director Jonathan Kinkley . The catalogue will contain new scholarship about this relatively unknown era in art history and original documentation of important artworks in the exhibit, many of which have never been photographed or studied. The education program will include a symposium of new media artists and scholars. The public of the Midwest and audiences of the Terra Foundation&rsquo;s Art Design Chicago initiative will benefit. 
For more information, see the press release pdf below. 
This project is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and is
part of Art Design Chicago, an exploration of Chicago's art and design
legacy, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art with
presenting partner The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation

Chicago New Media 1973-1992 Press Release

Spiral PTL, Video, 1980

VGA Exhibition Tells Underrecognized Story Of New Media In Chicago

Date & Time: May 8th, 2018, 10am 
Location: 1000 SEO 
Defense committee: 
Andrew Johnson, Chair and Advisor 
G. Elisabeta Marai 
Marco D. Santambrogio, Politecnico di Milano 
Abstract: 
The video game industry is growing year after year, but one of the main problems that most developers have is how to address the right difficulty of a game to satisfy all the players that have different skills and different attitudes toward the game. The most used method to achieve this goal is the performance-based dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA), i.e. modifying the difficulty of the game according to the score of the player. Often, it is not enough to rely only on the score to adjust the game&rsquo;s difficulty. It is important to consider the emotional state of the person because each player is different and can enjoy playing the game in different ways. This is why affective-based DDA methods should be considered to adjust the difficulty of a game. Moreover, thanks to Virtual Reality, people can do physical exercises while playing the game and motivating them by implementing the best DDA method is even more important. In this thesis I first discuss the performance-based and affective-based methods implemented in other games and researches, and the background theory related to flow, arousal, and skin conductance. Then, a Virtual Reality game called ETNA (Entertaining Training Neuro Affective) has been developed in 3 variants, one implementing a performance-based only DDA, one implementing an affective-based DDA only, and one implementing a mixed perfo-affective DDA, with both of them active at the same time. A user study was conducted and the results showed that affective gaming can be implemented in Virtual Reality to improve the overall gaming experience. Moreover, the perfo-affective method was the one which obtained the best results.

MS Thesis Defense: &ldquo;ETNA: a Virtual Reality Game with Affective Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment based on Skin Conductance&rdquo;

Data &Time: Friday, May 4th, 2018, 11 am - 1pm 
Location: Room 3036 ERF 
Defense committee: 
Angus G. Forbes (Chair and Advisor) 
Andrew Johnson 
G. Elisabeta Marai 
Abstract: 
Simulating real-life light in a virtual world is computationally very expensive even in a limited capacity. The quality of images synthesized using computer graphics algorithms for offline rendering used in movies has increased significantly over the years. Real-time applications such as games still rely on non-physics based approximation methods for computing light to meet the time budget to render a frame. The demand for higher quality graphics for more realism in games is high which requires a better approximation technique. Acceleration data structures are used for speed up the rendering process by skipping the unwanted parts of the virtual scene for light calculations. Even with such structures rendering can take a very long time depending on the size of the 3D scene. Recently, deep learning approaches have shown great success in image processing problems. Although neural networks are extensively used for training AI agents and other parts of a game, only a handful of research exists in the 3D rendering space. 
In this work, I explore deep learning based approaches to 1) approximate indirect illumination and soft shadow from image space buffers, and 2) build acceleration structure for faster rendering. I also show evaluations of these networks to get insights about their performance and limitations.

MS Thesis Defense Announcement: &ldquo;Exploring Deep Learning Techniques for Real-time Graphics&rdquo;

MAY 24, 2018 - The 1980s and beyond were a pivotal time for the digital arts media in the Midwest, and many of the women who went to school or worked in the Midwest are now chronicled in the new book &ldquo;New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts&rdquo; published by University of Illinois (UI) Press. Foundational events at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) created an authentic, community-driven atmosphere of creative expression, innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration that crossed gender lines and introduced artistically informed approaches to advanced scientific research. 
Interweaving historical research with interviews and full-color illustrations, &ldquo;New Media Futures&rdquo; captures the spirit and contributions of 22 women working within emergent media as diverse as digital games, virtual reality, medicine, supercomputing visualization, and browser-based art. Of the 22 women profiled, nine are PhD/MS/MFA graduates and/or employees of the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), a research laboratory that, at the time, was a formal collaboration between the UIC Computer Science department and UIC School of Art and Design. They are: Maxine Brown, Carolina Cruz-Niera, Margaret Dolinsky, Copper Giloth, Lucy Petrovic, Dana Plepys, Mary Rasmussen, Sally Rosenthal and Barbara Sykes. 
This beautiful coffee-table book is edited by long-time EVL collaborators Donna Cox of the UIUC National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Ellen Sandor of (art)n, and Janine Fron, an independent game artist and creative director of (art)n. 
The book can be ordered from the <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y9s9dq86">UIPress website</a> and from <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y95352sf">Amazon.com</a>. 
UIPress is offering a 30% discount through July 15, 2018; go to the UIPress website and use the Promo Code S18UIP. 
UIPress has a special price of $25 for professors who want to use this book in courses; go to the UIPress website and click on &ldquo;Exam and Desk Copies&rdquo; in lower left.

UIC/EVL Featured in new book: New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts

OCTOBER 18, 2018 - &ldquo;Herstory: Digital Innovations Symposium and Book Signing,&rdquo; celebrates the book &ldquo;New Media Futures (NMF): The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts.&rdquo; The Symposium will take place at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 1205 West Clark, Room 1030, Urbana, IL, on October 26, 2018, from 8:30am - 2:00pm. 
The NMF chronicles 22 women who went to school or worked at UIUC, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the 1980s and beyond, during a pivotal time for the digital arts media in the Midwest. Nine of the 22 women profiled in the book are PhD/MS/MFA/BFA graduates and/or employees of the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), which, at the time, was a formal collaboration between the UIC Computer Science department and UIC School of Art and Design. 
Thirteen of the book&rsquo;s contributors will attend the Symposium - including the woman who designed the first graphical web browser, the first female gaming company founder, and the woman who helped build the first room-sized virtual reality room environment - and will give TED-inspired Lightning Talks, and meet with attendees. They will discuss their passions, digital innovations and their herstories - both formally in short presentations and informally in small group breakouts - to inspire and mentor a young and diverse audience. Seven of the speakers have an affiliation with EVL: Maxine Brown, Carolina Cruz-Neira, Margaret Dolinsky, Copper Giloth, Dana Plepys, Mary Rasmussen and Barbara Sykes. 
For more information about the Symposium, see the flyer below and <a href="http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/events/herstory-digital-innovations-symposium">go to the website.</a> 
<a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2369">More information about the NMF book.</a>

UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory Graduates and Staff Participate in Symposium &ldquo;Herstory: Digital Innovations&rdquo;

&lsquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rsquo; pays tribute to the city&rsquo;s contribution to video games and digital art 
EDITOR&rsquo;S NOTE: Chicago&rsquo;s Reader newsletter, on November 29, 2018, reviewed the art exhibition &ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rdquo; currently at Gallery 400 on the UIC campus from November 1 until December 15, 2018. This exhibition prominently features the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), as it spans the dates EVL was founded (1973), through EVL&rsquo;s introduction of the CAVE&trade; automatic virtual environment (1992). This exhibition opened with an afternoon symposium featuring EVL co-founders and co-directors emeriti Tom DeFanti (distinguished professor emeritus of UIC Computer Science) and Dan Sandin (professor emeritus of UIC Art), as well as early students and collaborators. 
The show focuses on Chicago&rsquo;s contribution to new media history through a broad installation of video games, digital art, video art, and archival materials. Curator Jon Cates, Associate Professor of Film, Video, New Media and Animation, Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is interviewed by Reader journalist Caroline Picard, and highlights the way &ldquo;new media&rdquo; - video art, video games, and electronic music - evolved through a radical community of Chicago-based early adopters in the early 70s. 
&ldquo;&lsquo;This creative culture of collaborative communities [in Chicago] gathered together regularly to perform in various configurations publicly during annual Electronic Visualization Events on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago,&rsquo; he says. &lsquo;Their connections were social, artistic, educational, and technological.&rsquo; The exhibition shows how people like Dan Sandin, Phil Morton, Tom DeFanti, Ted Nelson, Jamie Faye Fenton, and others connected commercial gaming, academic research, and independent art-making in a way that permanently impacted the industry. These figures, Cates says, &lsquo;fostered ethical commitments through new kinds of art, novel in their form and content.&rsquo;&rdquo; 
In summary, Picard writes: &ldquo;Most of these innovations have become so integrated in our daily lives, it&rsquo;s difficult to remember that they are not only recent but also shaped, at least partly, by Chicagoans. Cates and his partners have created a compelling installation with almost 100 contributing artists, scientists, developers, and public program participants. The resulting showcase of once-innovative equipment, archival materials, school curricula, interactive timelines, and video games not only captures the energy of play but also the processes by which we see ourselves today.&rdquo; 
Read the entire Reader article - <a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-new-media-1973-1992-gallery-400/Content?oid=63970577">&lsquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&rsquo; pays tribute to the city&rsquo;s contribution to video games and digital art.</a> 
There is still time to visit Gallery 400 and see <a href="https://www.evl.uic.edu/entry.php?id=2404">&ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992,&rdquo;</a> which ends December 15. 
<a href="https://cada.webhost.uic.edu/Gallery_400/G400_homepage_a.html">Gallery 400 Website</a>

Dan Sandin, <a href="https://youtu.be/7rBDNxpJQQs ">&ldquo;A Volume of Two Dimensional Julia Sets&rdquo;</a> (frame from animation), 2002

Reader reviews &ldquo;Chicago New Media 1973-1992&ldquo; exhibition featuring UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory

Good Gamer 
Pearl Shin <a href="https://emails.uofi.uic.edu/newsletter/2432950.html">(UIC Magazine, Spring 2020)</a> Lindsay Grace, MFA &rsquo;09 - Knight Chair of Interactive Media at the University of Miami (Fla.) School of Communication - has turned his passion for video games into a career, and in the process, created innovative games with a positive social impact. 
WHAT LED YOU TO GAME DESIGN? 
I had an off-again/on-again romance with games until I became a web developer. Then I really started to see the long-term potential for games to offer positive social impact and engagement. 
HOW DID YOUR TIME AT UIC CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR WORK? 
I took my first game course at UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Lab. I wasn&rsquo;t the best student, but I was eager, and I found UIC to be an invigorating environment, especially when you mixed arts-focused students and faculty with engineers and computer scientists, as EVL did. 
IN WHAT WAYS DO YOU THINK GAMES HAVE A SOCIETAL IMPACT? 
Play helps us learn; it helps us be creative and serves many other functions. Games help shape our play, by giving us new challenges and frameworks. So, when we create educational games, we tap into the innate propensities of play to produce social good. I find it rewarding when teaching opens whole new perspectives for my students - the moment they go from media consumers to producers and critics. They can peek behind the curtain, understand how things work and identify how they can be improved.

Lindsay Grace, EVL alumnus

EVL Alumnus Lindsay Grace Profiled in the UIC Magazine Spring 2020 Edition

EVL PhD candidate Juan Trelles Trabucco has been recognized among the UIC Computer Science Department&rsquo;s 2020 Outstanding Graduate TAs. This award typically recognizes graduate TAs for their work over an entire year, but given Juan&rsquo;s stellar performance during the spring semester, and especially during the pandemic, Juan is being duly recognized for his contributions to courses CS426 and CS529. 
&ldquo;Juan&rsquo;s TA performance in CS426 was beyond spectacular. The course had 60 students enrolled and made use of a variety of technologies. Yet with Juan&rsquo;s help, we had a flawless transition to online teaching, when the pandemic lockout was instituted.&rdquo; 
CS associate professor Elisabeta Marai was the instructor for both courses. CS426: Video Game Design and Implementation covers tools and techniques for the design and implementation of 3D interactive video games. CS529: Visual Data Science is an introduction to key design principles and techniques for interactively visualizing and analyzing data in data science. 
In addition, to the usual TA assignments of tutoring students, grading papers, etc. assisting in the transition of these courses to an online virtual platform posed additional challenges, and makes Juan truly deserving of this recognition. 
Please join us in congratulating Juan!

EVL PhD Candidate Juan Trelles Trabucco Receives CS 2020 Outstanding TA Award

October 1 - - EVL Director of Research Andrew Johnson has been named Interim Director of EVL following Maxine Brown&rsquo;s retirement from UIC. Johnson now assumes the responsibility of heading EVL - overseeing EVL&rsquo;s overall mission in education, research, development, and technology transfer. 
For over 23 years, Johnson has been a valued EVL faculty member (Professor of Computer Science) and researcher who has focused upon interaction and collaboration using advanced visualization displays and the application of those displays to enhance discovery and learning. 
His areas of expertise include visualization, virtual and augmented reality, natural language processing, visual analytics, and high-performance networking. 
Over the years, Johnson has been instrumental in the development of EVL instrumentation and systems, including the Continuum smart environment, CAVE2&trade;, LambdaVision high-resolution tiled displays, LambdaTable tabletop touch system, GeoWall portable geoscience display environment, PARIS augmented reality and ImmersaDesk virtual reality systems. He has overseen the development of numerous visualization and virtual reality applications across diverse domain disciplines from science and engineering to the humanities and art. Johnson is a highly regarded mentor and educator to EVL&rsquo;s graduate students and undergraduates alike. 
Johnson retains his position as Director of Research while leading EVL&rsquo;s future initiatives and innovations as Interim Director.

Andrew Johnson Named Interim Director, EVL

Join us in congratulating EVL faculty and School of Design professor Daria Tsoupikova who has been named the SIGGRAPH 2021 Art Papers Chair. Each year, hundreds of computer graphics researchers, professionals and technologists contribute their scientific innovations, technical achievements, and artistic accomplishments to the SIGGRAPH Art Papers venue. This is a juried and peer reviewed event, which comprises an unparalleled, collaborative experience that is one of the world&rsquo;s largest and most influential events at the intersection of art, science, and technology. 
Find out more about all of the SIGGRAPH Programs and join us online next summer for <a href="https://s2021.siggraph.org/">SIGGRAPH 2021</a>.

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