On 16 January 2024, a special PhD presentation took place as a part of the ongoing open learning space organised by the master’s programme Game Studies and Engineering. Ria Sommer MA from the University of Osnabrück presented her ongoing research on Actual Play and Let’s Play practices. The event was moderated by Dr Felix Schniz BA MA and visited by students from various disciplines and AAU lecturers.
On January 8th, 2025, the 14th Video Browser Showdown (VBS) took place at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM2025), in Nara, Japan. 17 international teams competed against each other over about five hours and solved very challenging tasks. VBS is the largest international video retrieval competition and teams had to perform search in a dataset with a total of 31.715 video files and 5.930 hours, coming from the V3C, LHE, and MVK video collections. This year, in addition to the typical task types, such as KIS-V/KIS-T (known-item search with visual and textual hints), AVS (ad-hoc video search) and QA (interactive question answering), we had a new category called KIS-C (conversational known-item search), where an oracle of a few people mentioned hints and answered questions to the teams about the scene of interest. Overall, VBS2025 was a challenging and fascinating event, with a lot of fun, exciting queries, and great video retrieval systems.
We would like to thank the 17 teams with 95 unique authors from 13 countries for their participation and congratulate them to the great success at VBS2025. Congratulations in particular go to
– the NII-UIT team, who was the overall winner and provided the best expert system
– the VEAGLE team, who provided the best novice system
Also ITEC’s video retrieval system, diveXplore, performed very well and achieved the 3rd place in the overall scoring.
VBS is a huge event that requires a lot of organization efforts.
Many thanks go to Werner Bailer for creating and checking all the queries in advance, to Cathal Gurrin for doing an amazing job at moderation over 5 hours, to all the live judges (Dimitris Georgalis, Gylfi Þór Guðmundsson, Björn Þór Jónsson, Andreas Leibetseder, Laura Rettig, Heiko Schuldt, Dimitris Stefanopoulos) for assessing submissions that could not be evaluated automatically, the oracle members (Björn Þór Jónsson, Stevan Rudinac, Heiko Schuldt) for exciting query hints, the developers of the distributed retrieval evaluation servery (DRES) (Luca Rossetto, Loris Sauter, Ralph Gasser), the creators of the datasets (particularly Luca Rossetto and Sai-Kit Yeung), and all the local organizers of MMM2025 (Ichiro Ide, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, ChangSheng Xu, Keiji Yanai, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shin’ichi Satoh, Marc Kastner, and others). THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!
On 14 January, Dr Felix Schniz and GSE Student Peter Miklautz organised the “Magic Academy.” The event took place in the library’s Unruhezone and introduced GSE and other students to the concept of Trading Card Games. It served as an introductory event for a series of follow-up “Magic Academies”, which are scheduled for the end of this semester and over the course of next semester. The series concludes in June with a three-day event on academic perspectives on Trading Card Games, featuring international guest speakers, workshops on the mechanics, stochastics, and analytical observations on different card game systems, and an analogue game design mini-game jam.
With over 30 students attending, this kick-off was a magical success!
The paper “Two-pass Encoding for Live Video Streaming” has been selected as the Best Student Paper at the NAB Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) Conference 2025.
Abstract: Live streaming has become increasingly important in our daily lives due to the growing demand for real-time content consumption. Traditional live video streaming typically relies on single-pass encoding due to its low latency. However, it lacks video content analysis, often resulting in inefficient compression and quality fluctuations during playback. Constant Rate Factor (CRF) encoding, a type of single-pass method, offers more consistent quality but suffers from unpredictable output bitrate, complicating bandwidth management. In contrast, multi-pass encoding improves compression efficiency through multiple passes. However, its added latency makes it unsuitable for live streaming. In this paper, we propose OTPS, an online two-pass encoding scheme that overcomes these limitations by employing fast feature extraction on a downscaled video representation and a gradient-boosting regression model to predict the optimal CRF for encoding. This approach provides consistent quality and efficient encoding while avoiding the latency introduced by traditional multi-pass techniques. Experimental results show that OTPS offers 3.7% higher compression efficiency than single-pass encoding and achieves up to 28.1% faster encoding than multi-pass modes. Compared to single-pass encoding, encoded videos using OTPS exhibit 5% less deviation from the target bitrate while delivering notably more consistent quality.
Authors: Mohammad Ghasempour (AAU, Austria); Hadi Amirpour (AAU, Austria); Christian Timmerer (AAU, Austria)
Delivering video content from a video server to viewers over the Internet is time-consuming in the streaming workflow and has to be handled to offer an uninterrupted streaming experience. The end-to-end latency, i.e., from the camera capture to the user device, is particularly problematic for live streaming. Some streaming-based applications, such as virtual events, esports, online learning, gaming, webinars, and all-hands meetings, require low latency for their operation. Video streaming is ubiquitous in many applications, devices, and fields. Delivering high Quality-of-Experience (QoE) to the streaming viewers is crucial, while the requirement to process a large amount of data to satisfy such QoE cannot be handled with human-constrained possibilities. Satisfying the requirements of low latency video streaming applications requires the streaming workflow to be optimized and streamlined together, which includes media provisioning (capturing, encoding, packaging, an ingesting to the origin server), media delivery (from the origin to the CDN and from the CDN to the end users), media playback (end user video player). The 2nd workshop on Surpassing Latency Limits in Adaptive Live Video Streaming (LIVES 2025) aims to bring together researchers and developers to satisfy the data-intensive processing requirements and QoE challenges of live video streaming applications through leveraging heuristic and learning-based approaches.
Please click here for more information.
At the HiPC 2024 (31st IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analysis) held in Bengaluru, India from December 18-21, Haleh Dizaji received the HiPC Distinguished Paper Award for the paper “Graph Sampling Quality Prediction for Algorithm Recommendation” written together with Reza Farahani, Joze M. Rozanec, Ahmet Soylu, Dragi Kimovski and Radu Prodan. Radu Prodan who participated in the conference received the award. Congratulations!
A remarkable display of game development talent unfolded at the University of Klagenfurt as 64 participants created 16 unique games during the intensive Klagenfurt GSE Jam, held December 13-15, 2024. The event, which welcomed in-person and online participants, challenged developers to create games around the theme “Final Countdown,” resulting in an impressive array of interpretations.
The event commenced with opening remarks from Wilfried Elmenreich and Felix Schniz, launching participants into 48 hours of intensive development. While anchored in the University’s Game Studies and Engineering master program, the jam welcomed developers of all backgrounds, creating a dynamic environment for creative collaboration. Organizers Armin Lippitz, Bodo Thausing, and Tom Tucek structured the event to maximize creative potential while maintaining a supportive atmosphere.
The diversity of submitted games demonstrated remarkable creativity, with developers crafting experiences ranging from intense action games to atmospheric adventures and narrative-driven experiences. Many teams embraced additional challenges known as diversifiers, including “Unconventional Controls,” “Minimalist Style,” and “Unusual Perspectives,” adding extra layers of complexity to their projects. The resulting games were evaluated across multiple categories, including Most Fun Game, Best Art, Best Audio, Best Writing, and Best Use of Theme, ensuring recognition for excellence across all aspects of game development.
Competition was fierce this year, with numerous standout titles demonstrating the participants’ ability to blend innovative gameplay mechanics with creative interpretations of the countdown theme. The event culminated in a game fair showcasing all sixteen titles, highlighting the remarkable achievements possible within a 48-hour development window.
All games from the Klagenfurt GSE Jam are available to play at https://itch.io/jam/klagenfurt-gse-jam-ws24/entries
Local game developers and researchers gathered for the inaugural Game Creators Barcamp on Friday, December 6th, at the University of Klagenfurt. The event featured discussions on game development, educational technologies, and industry funding opportunities.
The first Barcamp drew a small but engaged group of participants who explored various game design and development topics. Discussions covered diverse areas, including the story behind the game Electric Alps, potential improvements in language learning through gamification, particularly for teaching irregular German verbs, and an examination of game theory in puzzle game design. The attendees also provided an overview of funding schemes available for game studios. Plans are underway for the next Barcamp, scheduled for spring, hoping to increase participant numbers.
On 20 November, Dr Felix Schniz commemorated the 20th anniversary of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft by giving an interview to the Kleine Zeitung. The interview focused on the secret behind World of Warcraft’s ongoing success and what we can learn from a historiographic perspective on the game.
The full interview was released in print on 23 November. It can also be accessed here:
Calling all game enthusiasts! Whether you’re into game development, game design, game studies, or anything in between, join us for the Game Creators Barcamp.
When: December 6th, 2024 from 13:15 to 16:00
Where: HS 4, Klagenfurt University
A Barcamp is an open, participant-driven event. There’s no pre-set schedule—you create the content! Attendees can sign up on-site on the day to host an (up to) 20-minute-session. This can be a game-related talk, a discussion, or an on-stage demo.
Some topics to explore might include:
This is a chance to share your knowledge, explore new ideas, or simply connect with others who share your passion for games. Whether you’re a seasoned developer, an indie creator, a GSE student, or just curious, you’re welcome to take part in shaping the day!
🔗 Sign up to host a session on-site, or just come along and join the conversation!