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.

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.

Xin Tong, Dr. Diane Gromala, Dr. Chris Shaw and Patrick Clarkes paper got accepted in Electronic Visualisation and the Arts Conference (EVA) 2014 and Dr. Shaw presented their paper Transformation between Electronic Arts and Chronic Pain: Long-term Body Activity Data Visualization and Pain Animation Expression in EVA.

Dr. Gromala and Dr. Shaw along with the Pain Studies Lab’s graduate students Mehdi Karamnejad, Xin Tong and Chao Feng attended GRAND 2014 in Ottawa. In Phase Two, CHRONIC project Leaders, NIs and HQPs coordinated meetings to discuss current progress within each sub-project and future research approaches and directions. The conference also facilitated networking sessions in order to assist project leaders and graduate students find potential collaborators. Additionally, graduate students Mehdi Karamnejad and  Xin Tong presented posters about their new research and study.  Chao Feng demoed his thesis research in various tracks.