PaoloBurelli.com

Virtual Cinematography and Player Experience

Paolo — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:11:54 +0000

Virtual cinematography in games needs a new understanding of the relationship between camera movements and player experience to be able to mature both scientifically and technologically.
With a better knowledge of such a relationship and how it differs from the classical direction-veiwer relationship in movies, it will be possible to identify more clearly the objectives of interactive virtual cinematography and perhaps to redefine the way we even talk about it.
With this in mind, I run an experiment to explore player preferences on different cinematographic aspects of camera positioning and animation in a 3D game.

I will be presenting this work at the International Conference On The Foundations Of Digital Games this May in Crete, you can read here the abstract and you can find the complete article in my publications page.

Cinematography is a key aspect in the development of modern computer games. The quality of the visuals depends, not only on the accuracy of the rendering, but on the way that the scene is presented to the player. Which element should be included in the frame, from which point of view and in which positions are all aspects that have been widely stud- ied in classical cinematography. However, it is still unclear how the principles developed for the film medium are ap- plicable to an interactive medium such as computer games. This article presents a study, which explores the interplay between cinematography and player experience. The results of the experiment demonstrate the existence of an impact of the cinematographic behaviour of camera on both player’s affect and her in-game behaviour. Furthermore, this impact is dependent on the game mechanics highlighting once more the difference between classic cinematography and game cinematography.

WICED 2013 in Crete between the 14th and the 17th of May

Paolo — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 10:24:25 +0000

The Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing (WICED) aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and industrial experts from fields including 3D graphics, artificial intelligence, visualization, interactive narrative, cognitive and perceptual psychology, computational linguistics, computational aesthetics, visual effects and others who are working on the many related aspects of automatic camera control.

The second edition of the workshop will be held in Crete from the 14th to the 17th of May within the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 2013.
More information can be found on the workshop’s website: http://wiced.cameracontrol.org.

These are some videos of the presentations given during the 2012 edition:

EvoGames 2013

Paolo — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:54:01 +0000

Next year’s EvoGames will be held in Vienna from April the 3rd to the 5th. Make sure to come and contribute with great science!
The conference covers topics suc as:

Computational Intelligence in video games
Intelligent avatars and new forms of player interaction
Player experience measurement and optimization
Procedural content generation
Human-like artificial adversaries and emotion modelling
Authentic movement, believable multi-agent control
Experimental methods for gameplay evaluation
Evolutionary testing and debugging of games
Adaptive and interactive narrative and cinematography
Games related to social, economic, and financial simulations
Adaptive educational, serious and/or social games
General game intelligence (e.g. general purpose drop-n-play Non-Player Characters, NPCs)
Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS)
Affective Computational Intelligence in Games

Take a look at the EvoGames 2013 call for papers and the full event’s website.

Optimising For Multiple Shots

Paolo — Thu, 31 May 2012 22:15:18 +0000

This is my presentation at the first workshop on intelligent cinematography and editing; it is about a work in collaboration with Mike Preuss on using niching and restart to find multiple alternative cameras.
You che download the article and the slides if you like it.

Automatic Camera Control in Computer Games @ TU Dortmund

Paolo — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:26:35 +0000

My project on automatic camera control in computer games presented at TU Dortmund this June.

New demos and experiments

Paolo — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:47:11 +0000

Along with the new layout, the blog has been enriched with two new demos and one interactive online experiment.
Check the CamOn Platform Demo to see the lates evolution of my automatic camera control library and the Head Controlled Camera Demo for a preview of my next research direction.
In the Experiments section you can find the Lerpz Escape Experiment, a little evaluation of the effect of different camera control paradigms in 3D games.

Being your own director

Paolo — Thu, 05 May 2011 09:30:06 +0000

Tomlinson et al., in their paper on expressive autonomous cinematography, quote a statement by Steven Drucker at SIGGRAPH ’99: ”It was great! I didn’t notice it!”. Drucker was commenting Tomlinson’s work presented at SIGGRAPH that year and, in his comment, he clearly associates the quality of a camera control system with the lack of intrusiveness. How can we achieve such a result? how is it possible to take the control of the camera from the player but still moving the camera the … Continue reading →

Cameracontrol.org

Paolo — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:04:01 +0000

Few weeks ago a new website on virtual camera control opened, it is still in its early life but it contains already a bunch in interesting things like the bibliography page.

This website wants to be a resource for people interested in virtual camera control. We are going to keep the blog updated with information about research activities on camera control (conferences, papers, …) and about camera control in applications.

www.cameracontrol.org

Tenure track in Italy? (post in italian)

Paolo — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 08:03:38 +0000

DDL Gelmini, Articolo 21 Comma 5: “Nell’ambito delle risorse disponibili per la programmazione, nel terzo anno di contratto di cui al comma 3, lettera b), l’universita` valuta il titolare del contratto stesso, che abbia conseguito l’abilitazione scientifica di cui all’articolo 16, ai fini della chiamata nel ruolo di professore associato, ai sensi dell’articolo 17. In caso di esito positivo della valutazione, il titolare del contratto, alla scadenza dello stesso, e` inquadrato nel ruolo dei professori associati. La valutazione si svolge in conformita` agli standard qualitativi individuati con apposito regolamento di ateneo nell’ambito dei criteri fissati con decreto del Ministro. La programmazione di cui all’articolo 17, comma 2, assicura la disponibilita` delle risorse necessarie in caso di esito positivo della procedura di valutazione. Alla procedura e` data pubblicita` sul sito dell’ateneo. L’espletamento del contratto costituisce titolo preferenziale nell’ammissione ai concorsi nelle pubbliche amministrazioni.”

Forse è la volta buona che smettiamo di avere ricercatori di 50 anni? 8 anni di tenure track sono un po’ tantini ma meglio di niente…

The first Automatic Camera Control System

Paolo — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:45:35 +0000

Tommaso just linked me this video, it shows the first ever developed automatic camera control system by James Blinn in 1988.