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Master Student wins Best Poster and Demo Awards at Videojogos 2011 Conference

Master Student wins Best Poster and Demo Awards at Videojogos 2011 Conference

MET Student António Gomes António Gomes, a dual degree Professional Master student of Entertainment Technology (MET), wrote the proposals for the Demo and Poster Awards competitions at the Videojogos 2011 Conference held in Porto, Portugal, and won both prizes.

The practical components of both proposals were carried out during the course of Building Virtual Worlds in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, along with other MET students. The game demo presented by António Gomes, titled “Whack ‘Em All – Head Mounted Display Interaction Enabled by Motion Trackers,” was developed by him, with three other MET students António Candelária, Kitesh Muchandani and Tim Forsythe. The goal was to present an immersive single player game system developed for an environment that mixes virtuality with reality using Head Mounted Display and Motion Tracking Technology. António Gomes explained in his proposal that “placing the player outside the computer screen encourages physical interaction as users can have their virtual avatar replicating all the movements and actions they make in a real world scenario which lastly will provide them with a sense of power and meaningfulness of their actions.” The demo of this game is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxLMvK4PCGY .

The poster that won the contest for best poster award was about the “CLAUDs – Challenge Leading to the Appreciation of User Differences.” Presented by António Gomes, with António Candelária and Shibli Mansuri, this poster reveals an immersive game for exploring the factors that lead children to work together at their own choice. Through this study, the team understood how it is possible to reduce the co-operation gap through an interactive system that provides a mechanism for exploring the effect of changes in the game environment and outcomes when playing both solo and cooperatively.

According to António Gomes, “these awards reflect the top level education we get from both Universidade da Madeira and the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. I believe we won because we combined our strengths working as a team and leaving multicultural differences aside, as it’s required in such a broad program. We combined programming and design to come up with good products and the audience, who voted for us, recognized that”.

The Videojogos 2011 conference, held in the beginning of December 2011, was a multidisciplinary event that looked for contributions from several areas of knowledge including art, game narrative, computational aspects of the field as well as its study, theory and critic reflexion about practics and application in both the market and industry.

António Gomes has a bachelor in Computer Science awarded by the Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra (ISEC), and a bachelor in Communication and Multimedia Design awarded by the Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico de Coimbra (ESEC), both in Coimbra.

December 2011