Jean-Pierre Jessel

Origins of Serious Games

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the historical origins of Serious Games to try to understand where the current wave of “Serious Games” comes from. We first review the origins of the “Serious Games” oxymoron. We will then analyse digital games designed for serious purposes before the 2000s. Such games can be traced back to the beginning of the history of video games. We will use all these elements to discuss how the current wave of “Serious Games” began; and to highlight the differences between “Serious Games” and their ancestors.

Towards a serious game to help students learn computer programming

Video games are part of our culture like TV, movies, and books. We believe that this kind of software can be used to increase students interest in computer science. Video games with other goals than entertainment, serious games, are present, today, in several fields such as education, government, health, defence, industry, civil security, and science. This paper presents a study around a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. Real-Time Strategy, which is a popular game genre, seems to be the most suitable kind of game to support such a serious game. From programming teaching features to video game characteristics, we define a teaching organisation to experiment if a serious game can be adapted to learn programming.

Experimental Feedback on Prog&Play: A Serious Game for Programming Practice

This paper presents an experimental feedback on a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. This serious game, called Prog&Play, is built on an open source real‐time strategy game. Its goal is to be compatible with different students, teachers and institutions. We based its evaluation on an iterative process that allows to implement the game and carry out experimentations in several contexts. Through this assessment, we define a framework which has been tested by third parties and we analyse both positive and negative points to improve the project. Evaluation is indeed beneficial and enables you to establish communication about the implemented practices.

An Extended Radiosity Using Parallel Ray-Traced Specular Transfers

The realism in image synthesis needs complex illumination models. In this paper, our goal is to describe a parallel extended radiosity method with general reflectance functions. This approach will allow us to produce realistic images. At first, we analyse existing extended radiosity methods to explain the energy transfer principles and how to compute them. Then we study theoretical frameworks on radiance and luminance transfers in a close environment to deduce a progressive extended radiosity method with parallel ray-traced specular transfers. Then we describe our implementation of this method in the VOXAR machine, parallel architecture dedicated to the ray-tracing algorithm.

Visualization of Isosurfaces with Parametric Cubes

To render images from volume datasets, an interpolation method also called reconstruction is needed. The level of details of the resultant image closely depends on the filter used for reconstruction. We propose here a new filter producing C1 continue surfaces. The provided image quality is better than current high‐quality algorithms, like splatting or trilinear raycasting, where tiny details are often eliminated. In contrast with other studied high quality filters that are practically unusable, our algorithm has been implemented interactively on a modest platform thanks to an efficient implementation using parametric cubes. We also demonstrate the interest of a min‐max octree in the visualization of isosurfaces interactively thresholded.

A Virtual Reality Tool for Teleoperation Research

Efficiency in teleoperation systems is strongly affected by the relationship between the operator and the remote environment If the operator has access to easily comprehensible information, his capability for opportune decision making increases Virtual reality has been shown to be an effective means of displaying information to the human operator It allows the creation of three-dimensional and interactive environments, which can be explored and controlled in an intuitive way. In our system, called ASSET, we have applied virtual reality techniques in the design and implementation of a teleoperation systems human-machine interface. ASSETs objective was to create an object-oriented software framework for teleoperation systems development This tool allows flexible customizing and can be used as a test bed for evaluating interaction techniques, devices, simulation models and for research about autonomous agents.

Évaluation d'un jeu sérieux pour l'apprentissage de la programmation

Video games are part of our culture like TV, movies and books. Video games with other goals than entertainment are called: serious games. We believe this kind of software can be used to increase students interest in computer science. This paper presents a study around a serious game dedicated to strengthening programming skills. Real-Time Strategy game, which is a popular game genre, seems to be the most suitable kind of game to support such a serious game. From programming teaching features to video game characteristics, we describe the serious game and its evaluation.

A Distributed Virtual Storytelling System for Firefighters Training

The aim of the proposed paper is to present a virtual reality scenario managing application which has been distributed according to the DoD (Department of Defense) High Level Architecture (HLA) standard. The system works over several implementations of the Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI, HLA software part), on networked PCs. The main scenario is a networked Firefighters Training Simulation where each computer can control one or several avatars either through human piloting or through Artificial Intelligence (AI) based behaviors using Learning Classifier Systems.

Accelerating volume rendering with quantized voxels

We present here a new algorithm for accelerating volume rendering with an orthographic projection. Because volume rendering handles huge data sets, a reduction in the computational cost of voxel projection is required to obtain interactive volume rendering. We satisfy this issue by using the possibilities of orthographic projection that allows the quantization of voxel positions by subdividing the pixels. The same projection properties are given for all the voxels with the center falling within the same pixel subdivision. In contrast with classical algorithms that require several instructions to compute either the next traversed voxel or the next rasterized pixel, our method needs only one addition instruction and one addressing instruction that is sufficient to determine one projected pixel. Splatting can also have a decisive advantage of it. Our algorithm is well suited for low-end platforms when no hardware acceleration is available. Experimental results show that our rendering rate is better than other existing methods. This algorithm might allow obtaining real-time volume rendering on conventional computers soon.

Perception-based filtering for MMOGs

Online games have exploded in the last few years. These games face several problems linked to scalability and interactivity. In fact, online games should provide a quick feedback of users interactions as well as a coherent view of the shared world. However, the search for enhanced scalability dramatically increases message exchange. Such an increase consumes processing power and bandwidth, and thus limits interactivity, consistency, and scalability. To reduce the rate of message exchange, distributed virtual environment systems use filtering techniques such as interest management that filters messages according to users interests in the world. These interests are influenced by perceptual facts which we study in this paper in order to build upon them a perception-based filtering technique. This technique satisfies users needs by precisely providing an exact filtering which is more efficient than other techniques.