News

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is presenting an invited talk an “How Sports and Computer Games Meet” at Sportsinformatik 2012 at the University of Konstanz, Germany, at 13 Sept 2012, from 9-10am.

The Exertion Games Lab won both the Student Games Design Competition Award as well as the Audience Award at the ACM supported research conference “Fun and Games” 2012 in France! Chad Toprak and Josh Platt won the Student Games Competition Award with Bubble Popper, and Chet De Mel, Amy Huggard and Jayden Garner won the Audience Award with Musical Embrace. The latter win is particularly remarkable as Fun and Games is a research conference and the three winners have not even started their postgraduate degree yet. Also, Chad Toprak and Josh Platt did a very engaging presentation of their paper at the conference. Congratulations, in particular to those who helped with the development of the games back in Melbourne: Alan Chatham, Wouter Walmink, Eberhard Graether, Andrew Lewis, Hsin Yang Ho, Eric Dittloff, Sevcan Ali, Daniel Beilharz, Luke Dominic-Butterworth, Paco Casares and Nicolas Hower.

The Exertion Game Lab’s Joggobot will be featured on Channel 10’s Scope program

The Exertion Games Lab’s Joggobot wins the Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Award 2012!

There are only 3 winners, who share the prize money, and we are getting invited to attend the award ceremony in Finland in October. The award is sponsored by Nokia and quite prestigious in the Ubicomp world, this is what they say about themselves:

“The 6th Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Awards competition, NUMA2012, seeks for novel ways to combine ubiquitous computing to media. We are looking for disruptive artistic visions as well as clever near-to-market solutions off the beaten tracks! This includes any range of innovative ubimedia, pervasive, or ambient products and services.”

All very exciting!

The Exertion Games Lab will be well represented at the Fun and Games conference 2012 in Toulouse, France, supported by ACM, with the following publications:

Toprak, C., Platt, J., Mueller, F. 2012. Bubble Popper: Considering Body Contact in Games. Fun and Games 2012. Short paper. 4 pages.

Toprak, C., Platt, J., Mueller, F. 2012. Bubble Popper: Considering Body Contact as Game Ingredient. Fun and Games 2012. Student Game Design Competition. 5 pages.

Toprak, C., Platt, J., Mueller, F. 2012. Bubble Popper: The Body Contact Experience. Fun and Games 2012. Demonstration. 1 page.

Toprak, C., Platt, J., Mueller, F. 2012. Designing Digital Games for Public Transport. Fun and Games 2012. Work in Progress. 3 pages.

Huggard, A., De Mel, A., Garner, J., Toprak, C., Chatham, A., Mueller, F. 2012. Musical Embrace: Using Social Awkwardness as a Game Ingredient. Fun and Games 2012. Student Game Design Competition. 5 pages.

The papers are now also on the publications page.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller has been invited to visit the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham, UK, for 3 weeks to learn about research on mixed realities.

Bubble Popper is now on RMIT’s YouTube channel.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller has been invited to present a keynote at Gamedays and Edutainment, the “International Conference on Serious Games and Edutainment”, from 18-20 Sept 2012.

Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller has been invited to present a keynote at the “Sportsinformatik” conference in Germany from 12-14 Sept 2012, where he will be talking about “Exertion games – Where computer games and sports meet“.

Danielle is on TED’s Talent Search, please vote for her!

We took this nice photo during our latest filming for TV, this time with Channel 10.

The Exertion Game Lab’s Joggobot will be featured on Channel 10’s Scope on 30th August 4pm, which is a science education TV program for children. This fits nicely with our theme to excite young people about science and technology while also getting them off the couch and exercise more. We are in the aptly named episode “Cool Machines”.

Channel 10 TV visited the Exertion Games Lab again today, filming Chad talking about Joggobot.

Bernie DeKoven, fun theorist, game designer and lecturer, blogged about Musical Embrace: http://www.deepfun.com/fun/2012/07/musical-embrace-musing-about-newer-games/

Angelina Russo writes about the Lumahelm:

“I first saw this helmet being photographed only about 4 weeks ago and am absolutely thrilled by the amount of publicity it has received. As a designer I was initially struck by its elegance and ultimately mesmerized by the sophisticated approach to visibility. Congratulations to Wouter and to the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University.”

Both of our student games from the Radical Games class and the Exertion Games Lab have been shortlisted to be presented at the research conference
Fun and Games 2012 in Toulouse, France, in the Student Game Design Competition.
The games are Musical Embrace and Bubble Popper, and congratulations to the students involved!

The Joggobot made it to SBS yesterday, check out the video and the article below to find out more:
Jogging robot sets the pace

Tomorrow morning, 29 Jun 2012, 6.45am, ABC Radio Australia will be interviewing Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller about the Joggobot live.

Yesterday the team from the Exertion Games Lab got together for a team photo (missing: Ruth, Jonathan, Chris x2, Harry, Alex, Atticus & safety team). This was the result:

Alan Chatham talked about the LumaHelm and our lab live on RRR radio yesterday, including Twitter pics from the hosts: