Monthly Archives

August 2014

Pain Studies Lab students scored Best Game and the Microsoft Surface Award at the UNITE Conference in Seattle

By | Conferences

Graduate students Amber Choo and Xin Tong, along with FCATs Undergraduate Research Fellow Cheryl Yu, won two awards at the Unite 2014 Conference in Seattle. Their two-dimensional boardgame – Aztec Treasures – was voted Best Game in the Unity & Windows Training and Porting Lab. Microsofts Surface devices were part of the award. Choo, Tong and Yu, who are Research Assistants in the Pain Studies Lab at Simon Fraser University in Canada, also snagged the Microsoft Surface Award for successfully porting three Virtual Reality (VR) games and one 2D boardgame to Windows phone online application store. Each received a Microsoft Nokia Lumia 1520 cell phone. According to the Pain Studies Lab founder and director, Dr. Diane Gromala, the immersive VR games were developed for patients who live with neuropathic or chronic pain to potentially help them manage this disease, as their early research results indicate. The board game was originally designed in SIATs graduate class in video game design. The UNITE conference attracted well over 1,000 attendees.

Expressive/Computational Aesthetics 2014

By | Conferences

Both Xin Tong and Chao Feng who are graduate students in Pain Studies Lab presented two posters at co-located venues SIGGRAPH/Expressive/Computational Aesthetics 2014. Xins poster presented her new pain expression visualization design and pain patients activity data visualization. Chaos poster presented part of his thesis research affective space visualizations. The posters represented the latest studies conducted at the Pain Studies Lab about pain visualizations and personal pain data analytics.

SIGGRAPH is one the most prestigious venues for showcasing breakthroughs in practices and production in Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Computational Aesthetics is one of SIGGRAPHs co-located venues that bridges the analytic and synthetic by integrating aspects of computer science, philosophy, psychology, and the fine, applied & performing arts.