Tag Archive for: games

On Friday, 13 June 2025, The Pioneers of Game Development Austria, the game development association focused on supporting, showcasing, and accelerating Austrian games, developers, and business, visited ITEC.

 

In an event organised by Dr Felix Schniz, Martin Filipp (Mi’pu’mi Games and PGDA representative) brought a delegation of industry representatives to campus, including Michael Benda (Zeppelin Studio), Raffael Moser (reignite games), and Manuel Bonell (Immerea). They held presentations on the status quo of the Austrian games industry and entertained a developer café in the afternoon, where students could sign up for discussion slots to ask questions about how to get into the industry and how to start your own gaming studio.

 

The event was visited by over 40 visitors, most of them students of the master’s programme Game Studies and Engineering.

 

Paper Title: Alternative inputs for games and AR/VR applications: deep headbanging on the web

Abstract: In multimedia research, scientific progress is often slowed downby high demands on hard- and software. However, hardware con-tinuously improves and today’s hardware got powerful enoughto meet the performance demands of complex 3D and deep learn-ing applications. With this demo, we demonstrate that utilizingdeep learning and 3D modeling is not a major barrier anymorewhen building prototypes for showcasing research projects. Ourweb-based game, called “HeadbangZ”, showcases a novel gesture-based input methodology realized through deeply learned poseestimation and user interaction in a 3D environment. Since gesture-based inputs increase the immersion in virtual environments, weassume this input methodology to be especially useful for AR/VRapplications and games. Furthermore, we demonstrate that rapidprototyping of applications using novel technologies, such as deeplearning, is even possible within 48 hours by developing a workingdemo within this time frame. Finally, we provide insights into whatwe learned during the development of HeadbangZ to encourageother researchers to make use of novel technologies. In referenceto Stephen Harper’s quote “Having hit a wall, the next logical stepis not to bang our heads against it.”, we hope that the presentationof HeadbangZ encourages researchers to bang their heads rhythmi-cally to rock music instead of angrily against a virtual wall createdby hard- and software limitations.

Authors: Philipp Moll, Andreas Leibetseder, Sabrina Kletz, Mathias Lux, Bernd Münzer (Institute of Information Technology, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)

More information on the paper can be found on: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3323832