Tag Archives: frank dufour

When the Perot Museum of Nature and Science opens this weekend, the state-of-the-art facility will feature the work of Arts and Technology students from The University of Texas at Dallas.

Derrick Dugan (left) and Charles McCormick were among students in the digital music production course.

During the last year, a group of undergraduates created soundscapes for the museum, giving the students hands-on experience in the field of sound design.

“This is a typical project that comes out of ATEC in that it connects art, science and technology in a creative dialogue and also contributes to positioning the University as a pertinent partner with major cultural institutions in the Metroplex,” said Dr. Frank Dufour, a professor of sound design who led the digital music production course. “Students were given a wonderful opportunity to express themselves in a professional environment in which their creativity was welcome.”

Dr. Frank Dufour

The students worked closely with Dufour and Roxanne Minnish, a UT Dallas sound design instructor, composer and project manager, and with museum officials to refine their designs throughout the semester.

“Dr. Dufour was conceptual in the way he taught, but also practical and logical. He is inspiring as a teacher,” said Josh Casey, a senior who worked on the project. “He guided us and gave us advice and challenged students to think about what the soundscapes should really represent.”

Located north of downtown Dallas near Victory Park, the 180,000-square-foot museum features five floors of public space with 11 permanent exhibit halls, including a children’s museum and a hall designed to host traveling exhibitions. The museum opens to the public on Saturday, Dec. 1.

The digital music production class worked on sound designs for the 11 exhibit halls, which include the T. Boone Pickens Life Then and Now Hall, Being Human Hall, Discovering Life Hall, Rose Hall of Birds, Sports Hall and the Texas Instruments Engineering and Innovation Hall, among others.

The students worked together, collaborating on certain designs and critiquing each other’s projects throughout the semester.

“At first, when people criticize your work you may be offended, but I learned to become grateful for criticism – I learned a lot about the creative process and how to collaborate and bring new ideas together,” Casey said.

Each design required specific sounds that would enhance the educational and artistic quality of the exhibit. For example, there are heartbeats for baselines in the Being Human Hall soundscape and sweeping notes that rise and fall – like a flight pattern – in the Rose Hall of Birds design.

“Collaborating with UT Dallas on this project is just one of the ways that the Perot Museum seeks to enhance the visitor experience through highly immersive exhibits that cater to diverse learning styles,” said Steve Hinkley, vice president of programs at the Museum. “The students’ work demonstrates not only their dedication to innovation, but is a testament to visitors that the intersection of art and science is all around us.”

As the Arts and Technology program continues to grow, three new faculty will join the program in spring 2013. A variety of new courses will be offered. View the full listing of ATEC and EMAC courses on CourseBook.

New Courses

A variety of new courses will be offered at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Visual Evidence is a multidisciplinary course, where we will look at exemplary visualizations in the broadest sense – from classic artworks, such as Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander, to the latest scientific plots and info-graphics. Besides analyzing visualizations much like art historians traditionally do with artworks, the course will also include some practical exercise in producing and criticizing visualizations, ideally based on examples from the student’s original focus of study.

Participants will acquire essential skills of critical seeing, enabling them to persuade with better visualizations by applying the principle of creative destruction in a cognitive way.

Integrating visualization and visual studies, the course will include introductory lectures, multidisciplinary guest speakers from ATEC and beyond, as well as collaborative projects and talks by the students.

Students from ATEC, EMAC as well as Arts and Humanities will bring in their specific skills and are encouraged to learn from each other. We will cross-fertilize literature work, critical seeing, as well as data science skills (such as acquisition, cleaning, analysis, and visualization). Programming and math skills are not necessary but very useful.

ATEC 6389 Ecology of Complex Networks
Maximilian Schich

The Ecology of Complex Networks is a fundamental phenomenon that permeates data across multiple disciplines. This course will provide an introduction to this multidisciplinary phenomenon with a (non-exclusive) focus on the arts, humanities and culture. The course will provide an overview of the emerging state of the field and it’s connections to other relevant areas, such as biology, computer science, economics, engineering, math, physics, social science, technology, and others.
Participants will acquire a basic understanding of complex network phenomena in a variety of fields, including what is currently known as data science and digital humanities.

In addition to introductory lectures and multidisciplinary guest speakers from ATEC and beyond, students will form small teams to analyze, visualize and interpret complex network data. Students from ATEC, EMACS as well as Arts & Humanities will bring in their specific skills and are encouraged to collaborate and learn from each other. We will cross-fertilize literature work, critical seeing, as well as data skills (such as acquisition, cleaning, analysis, and visualization). Basic to advanced skills in programming, statistics and math are not a requirement but very useful. Requires permission of instructor.

ATEC 6389 Virtual Analog Computing
Paul Fishwick

How would you represent computer data (big and small), equations, and code if you were told to build rather than to write software? This is the question we will explore in this seminar. Most computing has been analog until fairly recently, and our representations of software artifacts has been limited by cost of deployment.

A Petri net machine encoded in the game of Minecraft

While our computers are digital, we are analog. Recent research in neuroscience and embodied cognition indicates that we “simulate” when we read and think. This suggests a new approach to software design where we evolve new embodied media to design and build software. This media includes 3D games, mixed reality, physical computing, and 3D printing. The idea is to explore new machines in virtual spaces, and to re- envision “software” by making it analog, more accessible, and engaging, for a wide audience.

The course will involve instructor lectures, invited lectures, student talks and projects. Both ATEC and Engineering (especially Computer Science) students are encouraged to take the class. The main prerequisites are a knowledge of at least one programming language, and an interest in arts-based design.

More information about this course

ATEC 6389 Translation of Spaces and Time
Frank Dufour and Rainer Schulte

The conceptual frame of the seminar will be based on the paradigm of translation. Together with the students, the instructors plan to build the vocabulary necessary to perform complex descriptions and analyses of representations of space and time in films, poems, music, novels, plays, and interactive narratives. George Steiner’s statement that all acts of interpretation and communication are acts of translation can serve as an entrance into the study of time and space.

By its very nature, translation establishes dynamic interactions from texts to texts and cultures to cultures. Thus, students will be able to identify and describe specific aspects of representations of space and time as they relate to cultural and artistic contexts. Furthermore, the instructors will make students aware of the existence of digital tools and techniques specially designed for the analysis of textual and multimedia contents. In addition, students will gain experience in the use of such tools to build models for the recording of the representation of time and space in literature, film, music, and theater. The seminar should be of particular interest to students in arts and technology, aesthetic studies, arts and performance, and world literature.

The ultimate goal of the seminar will be the work toward recommendations for digital software that would facilitate the dynamic representations of time and space in multimedia environments.

New Faculty

Three new faculty members will be joining Arts and Technology in spring 2013: Paul Fischwick, Maximilian Schich and Scott Swearingen.

Paul Fishwick
Distinguished Endowed Chair of Arts and Technology and Professor of Computer Science

Paul Fishwick is joining the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in January 2013. He will be Distinguished Endowed Chair of Arts and Technology (ATEC) and Professor of Computer Science. Paul has six years of industry experience as a systems analyst working at Newport News Shipbuilding and at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia.

He has been on the faculty at the University of Florida since 1986, and is Director of the Digital Arts and Sciences Programs there. His PhD was in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Fishwick is active in modeling and simulation, as well as in the bridge areas spanning art, science, and engineering. He pioneered the area of aesthetic computing, resulting in an MIT Press edited volume in 2006.

He is a Fellow of the Society for Computer Simulation, served as General Chair of the Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), was a WSC Titan Speaker in 2009, and has delivered over fifteen keynote addresses at international conferences. He is Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group in Simulation (SIGSIM). Fishwick has over 200 technical papers and has served on all major archival journal editorial boards related to simulation, including ACM Transactions on Modeling and Simulation (TOMACS) where he was a founding area editor of modeling methodology in 1990.

Maximilian Schich
Associate Professor

Dr. Maximilian Schich is an art historian, joining The University of Texas at Dallas as an Associate Professor for Art and Technology in January 2013. He works to converge hermeneutics, information visualization, computer science, and physics to understand art, history, and culture.

Recently, Maximilian worked on complex networks in the arts and humanities with Dirk Helbing, FuturICT coordinator at ETH Zurich (2012), and Albert-László Barabási, complex network physicist at Northeastern University in Boston (2008-2012). He was a DFG Research Fellow (2009-2012) and received funding from the Special Innovation Fund of the President of Max-Planck-Society (2008).

Previously, Max obtained his PhD in Art History from Humboldt-University in Berlin (2007), and his MA in Art History, Classic Archaeology, and Psychology from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich (2001). Besides, he looks back at over a decade of consulting experience, working with (graph) data in libraries, museums, and large research projects (1996-2008).

Maximilian is the organizing chair of the ongoing NetSci symposia series on Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks, as well as an Editorial Advisor at Leonardo Journal (MIT-Press). He publishes in multiple disciplines and is a prolific speaker, translating his ideas to diverse audiences across academia and industry.

Teaching at UT Dallas, Maximilian Schich aims to raise visual literacy (Visual Evidence) and provide students with a multidisciplinary perspective (Ecology of Complex Networks in Arts, Culture, and Beyond). Both aspects count on Art and Technology as key ingredients to further our understanding of our increasingly complex world.

Scott Swearingen
Associate Professor

Scott Swearingen is an artist, developer, and educator who creates interactive multimedia spaces that blur the boundaries between the virtual and practical. He has been working at the intersection of art and technology for nearly 20 years specializing in the categories of digital imaging, kinetic sculpture, video games, and virtual environments.

His work has been widely published and has garnered recognition from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences as well as the Game Developers Choice Awards. He has collaborated on several award-winning franchises including Medal of Honor, The Simpsons, Dead Space and The Sims.

As a professional designer, Scott is responsible for deploying game systems, prototyping mechanics, and crafting the overall user experience. He has partnered with and been featured by such notable companies as CompuServe, Electronic Arts, and MAXIS.

Scott has also instructed on Game Design and Virtual Environments at The University of Texas at Dallas as an Assistant Professor. Since then, many of his former students have gone to excel in academia and at various industry studios including iD Software, Gearbox Software, and DreamWorks Animation SKG.

His personal interests bridge installation art with short-form game design. While Scott’s early work embodied this in spaces contextually bound to themes of navigation, his art is becoming increasingly haptic-driven in concept.

CentralTrak, UT Dallas’ artists residency and gallery in Deep Ellum, is launching a series of talks among artists, art enthusiasts, and art students and educators from across the Dallas area.

Not So Indifferent is a multi-media collaboration between Arts and Humanities faculty members Frank Dufour and Thomas Riccio.

This year’s series, which is titled Next Topic, will examine new digital media art. The series opens Thursday, Oct. 11, at 7 p.m. with UT Dallas School of Arts and Humanities professors Frank Dufour and Thomas Riccio. They will be discussing their collaborative multi-media exhibition Not So Indifferent, which is currently on display in the CentralTrak gallery. The exhibit combines digital media with site-specific design to create an existential drama – a performance that features the viewing public as lead actors in the projected video.

“The exhibit can be experienced as an interactive multimedia poem. A film is continuously read and analyzed by a program installed on three computers. Each computer generates sounds extracted from the film, or inspired by it, and displays images from a large database of clips that represent our collective visual and televisual memory,” said Dufour.

The bi-weekly art talks scheduled for this fall also include:

• Oct 25: Paula Gaetano Adi, an artist and researcher working in sculpture, performance, interactive installation and robotic agents. Using the human and nonhuman body as a point of departure, her work deals with different cultural studies of technoscience, particularly in regard to human subjectivity and how they can be reflected through art. Gaetano Adi holds a master of fine arts (MFA) with emphasis in arts and technology from Ohio State University.

• Nov 8: Alejandro Borsani,  a new media artist whose work explores the nature of perception and media representation. He holds a MFA in electronic arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and a MFA in electronic visualization from the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago

• Nov 29: Brittany Ransom, an artist and educator working in interactive installations, electronic art objects, and site-specific interventions that probe the lines separating human, animal, and environmental relations while exploring emergent technologies. She received her MFA with a focus in new media arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

CentralTrak is located at 800 Exposition Ave. in the historic Deep Ellum neighborhood near downtown Dallas. For more information, check the CentralTrak website or call (214) 824-9302. These events are free and open to the public.

Frank and Kristin Lee Dufour and two Arts and Technology graduate students will discuss how they used choreography and lighting to interpret movement in their experimental interactive sound installation, Acoustic Shadows, an Exploration of the Sense of Space.

Acoustic Shadows is an audiovisual immersive and interactive installation that depicts Orpheus surrounded by shadows of the underworld consumed by the shadow of his wife, Eurydice.

The Dufours and the cast and production team will discuss the immersive qualities in the work and the use of choreography and lighting to interpret movement in space. They are interested in exposing the question of unity and identity of a work of art, as it integrates multiple individual talents into a single expression.

The production team includes graduate student Sherri Balch Segovia, choreographer and Djakhangir Zakhidov, filmmaker.

The discussion will take place Thursday, May 17, 6:30-8:30 p.m. in The Center for Creative Connections Theater at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Honor is Arts and Technology Research Project’s Third National Honor in 2 Years

For the third time in two years, the First Person Cultural Trainer (FPCT), a research project from the UT Dallas Arts and Technology(ATEC) program, has won a national award for serious gaming.

The First Person Cultural Trainer game designed by ATEC simulates the challenges a soldier might encounter on patrol in a village.

FPCT received the Best Game award in the Government Category of the 2011 Serious Games Showcase and Challenge. FPCT is sponsored by U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command G-2 Intelligence Support (TRADOC).  The Serious Games Showcase is part of the Interservice/Interindustry Training and Simulation Education Conference (I/ITSEC), and was held in Orlando, Fla., from November 28 through December 1.

Earlier in 2011, FPCT earned first place in the Innovations in DoD Gaming Competition at the GameTech Users’ Conference  in Orlando. In 2010, FPCT won the cross-function award from the National Training and Simulation Association (NTSA).

FPCT is a four-level immersive game that allows Army leaders and other appropriate personnel to practice culturally correct ways of interacting with different populations around the world.  The game features a variety of innovations, like a branching conversation system and methods for displaying nonverbal communication and environmental perception. The program can also be ported to different game engines with minimal redevelopment.

The video game simulates conversations with people that a soldier might meet, in this case a village elder.

More than 50 games were entered in the I/ITSEC Serious Games contest, which had five categories – government, business, student, mobile and a special category, adaptive stance.  The work was reviewed by a panel of military, academic and industry gaming experts.  About 20,000 government, business, military and academic total registrants attend I/ITSEC every year. The conference is widely considered to be the largest and most competitive worldwide in modeling and simulation.

“This honor and the overall visibility that FPCT, UT Dallas and ATEC received at I/ITSEC this year is a real tribute to our sponsors at TRADOC, students,  faculty, project staff and administrators who have nurtured this project for going on four years,” said Dr. Marjorie Zielke, ATEC assistant professor.

Zielke is the associate director of the Institute for Interactive Arts and Engineering (IIAE) and principal investigator of the FPCT project.  Other faculty co-investigators on the project include Dr. Frank Dufour, assistant professor and director of the ATEC PhD program; Dr. Gopal Gupta, professor and head of the UT Dallas computer science department; and Dr. Thomas Linehan, professor and director of ATEC and the IIAE.  More than 20 students,  staff and faculty worked on the project for this development phase. The project has employed many more undergraduate, masters and PhD student developers over its four-year life cycle.

The FPCT captures the sights and sounds of life in a specific deployment area.

As part of the award, the development team received a kiosk display area at the conference where live gameplay was demonstrated to the large conference delegation.  Key developers from ATEC serious games projects gave demonstrations throughout the entire conference.

The developers were able to show the game to key government and business entities involved in modeling and simulation, including a representative from the White House, who visited the Serious Games pavilion to learn about national and international research in serious games.

In addition to winning the award, Zielke, Dufour and ATEC  Research Manager Gary Hardee presented a paper titled  “Creating Micro-expressions and Nuanced Nonverbal Communication in Synthetic Cultural Characters and Environments,” which highlighted some of the new FPCT development recently completed in October.

The School of Arts and Humanities opens its spring season by examining the relationship between sound and art with the mixed-media exhibit Sonic Architectonic.

Parts by exhibit artist Derrick Buisch is made in oil paint, enamel, spray paint on canvas, wood panel and multi-density fiberboard.

Curated by visual arts faculty member Lorraine Tady, the exhibit features both local and national artists who work directly with noise or frequency, examining what is heard or felt through sound waves, and some who work with images that suggest sound. Other artists in the exhibit anticipate our relationship to sound by addressing our expectations and cognitive reflexes.

“In contemporary art, sound is a medium used as a separate tool, or is intertwined with other mediums,” said Tady. “Some artists infuse their own open, hybrid visual forms and multimedia explorations with sound. This exhibit considers these approaches and more.”

Artists utilizing real sound with their visual works or as their artwork include Jill Auckenthaler, who, in collaboration with Sarah Phillips, will display What My Schedule Sounds Like. The work is both an instrumental score for an atonal sound piece and a watercolor and graphite work on paper.

Brad Tucker is creating Bagdad Bass Club, an interactive sound and object installation that combines videotaped music performance, customized audio equipment, handmade plastic records, ambient music and thumping intermittent bass sounds.

96-Tears no. 3 by John Pomara, professor of visual arts in the School of Arts and Humanities

Dr. Frank Dufour, assistant professor of sound design at UT Dallas, and adjunct art professor Stephen Lapthisophon, will, in separate works of art, direct sound into the gallery to inhabit and transform the architectural space of the gallery. Lapthisophon interprets Karl Marx through a disembodied voice reminiscent of German lieder. Dufour collaborates with David Searcy and Nancy Rebal to create an interactive soundscape alluding to world peace.

Paul Slocum offers his iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch app Magic Carpet. Visitors are invited to install the free app “carpet lite” to experience the hypnotic and meditative graphics in synchronization with the app’s generative music synthesizer.

Artists who will study sound in various visual ways using painting, drawing, and sculpture include John Pomara, professor of visual arts in the School of Arts and Humanities. Included are computer ink jet drawings by Robert Ortega, who is interested in patterns and “how to graphically relate light wavelength to audio frequency,” and Diane Fitch’s realist paintings of casual living room musicians.

what my schedule sounds like is both an instrumental score for an atonal sound piece and a watercolor and graphite work on paper. The work was created by Jill Auckenthaler in collaboration with Sarah Phillips.

The show opens with a reception on Friday, Jan. 27 from 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. in the Visual Arts Building. Visiting artist Brad Tucker will share a lecture of his work Friday Jan. 27at 10 a.m. in AS 1.116. The group exhibit will on display until Feb. 18, 2012.

Using the ancient myth of Orpheus, video projection and three-dimensional sound, a UT Dallas professor is examining the relationship of sound to perception of movement in Acoustic Shadows, an Exploration of the Sense of Space.

The Acoustic Shadows exhibit was a collaboration between Dr. Frank Dufour and his wife, Kristin Lee Dufour.

Acoustic Shadows is an audio-visual immersive and interactive installation that depicts Orpheus surrounded by shadows of the underworld consumed by the shadow of his wife, Eurydice.

In the myth, the gifted and musical Orpheus travels to the underworld after his wife dies to beg Hades to allow his wife to return to earth. After violating a condition made by Hades, Orpheus loses his wife forever.

Dr. Frank Dufour worked on the project with his wife, Kristin Lee Dufour, a creative art director and international consultant for visual communications.

“The viewer is enveloped in a multisensory, reactive system that actually ‘listens’ for changes in the environment generated by your presence and movement,” said Dufour, assistant professor of sound design in UT Dallas’ Arts and Technology program.

The audio-visual installation depicts Orpheus of ancient legend surrounded by shadows of the underworld and consumed by the shadow of his wife, Eurydice.

“This results in noticeable changes to the sound and projected images. Your body reflects and absorbs sound waves to create the auditory manifestation or form of silent movement, which, in this context, is termed ‘Acoustic Shadows.’”

The exhibit is currently on display in The Center for the Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art until April 2012. Acoustic Shadows made its debut at The Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence, France, earlier this year.

More about Dr. Dufour’s research is available in SoundEffects, a journal on sound and sound experience.

‘Acoustic Shadows’ Installation Explores Movement of Silent Objects

With a new exhibition in France, Dr. Frank Dufour, assistant professor of sound design in UT Dallas’ Arts and Technology (ATEC) program, has officially gone global.

“Acoustic Shadows: An Exploration of Sense of Space” is an experimental interactive sound installation Dufour created alongside wife Kristin Lee through the entity Agency 5970. The piece is currently on display at The Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence, France. Dufour worked on the sound and music aspects, while his wife tackled the visual side.

Dr. Frank Dufour

Two ATEC graduate students have been working with the Dufours: PhD student Sherri Segovia as choreographer and graduate student Djakhangir Zakhidov as videographer.

Of the installation, Dufour said, “It is an immersive audiovisual environment that senses and responds to the presence and movements of the spectators on the basis of the concept of ‘Acoustic Shadows.’ ”

Dufour describes the latter as “the auditory perception of the movements of silent objects and bodies by means of the changes they cast on a background sound.”

Agence 5970

The installation was designed to exemplify the phenomenon and make it known to a wider audience.

“Exhibiting in France is great, but our ultimate goal is to present this work here in the U.S.,” Dufour acknowledged.

Dr. Dennis Kratz, dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at UT Dallas, said, “Professor Dufour’s ingenious and vital contribution to the marriage of technology and art is its focus on the artistic possibilities of sound in not only its most sophisticated, but also its most basic aspects.”

On April 15, 2011, French new media philosopher Bernard Stiegler stepped into the Arts and Technology building to a room jam-packed with professionals, educators and students awaiting his arrival.

Thanks to Stiegler’s long time friendship with sound design pro Professor Frank Dufour, he happened to be passing through Dallas and agreed to give a talk entitled Forming and Deforming Attention.

The talk centered on the discussion of the importance of education in early development of attentional forms.

Dr. Stiegler is currently the Director of the Georges Pompidou Institute of Research and Innovation in Paris, which aims to anticipate changes in human behavior brought about by the evolution of technology.

He also holds an assistant professorship at the Goldsmith College in London and at the University of Compiegne.

A training tool being developed by a research team from the Arts and Technology (ATEC) program may soon make it easier for military service men and women to perform their missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The project offers virtual villages for soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan to practice their training skills.

Dr. Marjorie Zielke, the principal investigator on the project, holds the award plaque with her co-investigators, Dr. Thomas Linehan (left), director of Arts and Technology at UT Dallas; and Dr. Frank DuFour, assistant professor of sound design.

“The work we’re doing has to do with the facilitation of cultural training,” said Dr. Marjorie Zielke, an assistant professor in the ATEC program and the principal investigator on the project.  “The way some of that training has been done in the past and may still be done in certain areas is to build actual villages and hire actors to replicate a particular culture,”  Zielke said. “That kind of approach has some limitations in the sense that it’s expensive, not everyone can attend, it’s not easily changed because it’s a physical structure, you have to work with actual actors, and so forth.”

The ATEC team set out to re-create  a realistic virtual environment instead.  The result is First Person Cultural Trainer (FPCT), a 3D interactive game that  teaches soldiers the values and norms of Iraqi and Afghan cultures.  FPCT is a serious game, which means that it is designed for purposes other than pure entertainment, in this case, cultural training.

Players enter the community from the first-person point of view and collect information based on verbal and non-verbal cues observed in characters encountered along the way.

FPCT recently won the Cross-Function Team Award at the 2010 Modeling & Simulation Leadership Summit, held in Virginia Beach. Presented annually by the National Training & Simulation Association (NTSA), the Modeling & Simulation (M&S) Awards recognize achievement in the M&S functional areas of training, analysis and acquisition, and in support of the overall M&S effort.

First Person Cultural Trainer was also a finalist at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Florida in early December.  I/ITSEC promotes cooperation among the armed services, industry, academia and various government agencies in pursuit of improved training and education programs.

Zielke says ATEC has been working in the cultural training and simulation area for about three years, with about 15 students – at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels – working on this project.  Her co-investigators are Dr. Thomas Linehan, Endowed Chair and director of Arts and Technology at UT Dallas; and Dr. Frank DuFour, assistant professor of sound design.

The project team conducted extensive research to get the characters to look, sound and act like the culture they’re representing.

“Much of the cultural data is being developed in real time by the military,” Zielke said.  “By having it in a systems-based approach that is composable — in other words, we can generate culture in certain aspects of the game on the fly — we can respond to the data as soon as it becomes available.  We could change it overnight if we needed to.”

The project is supported and sponsored by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G-2 Intelligence Support Activity (TRISA).

“This prototype, now on its way to a full-fledged model, is a highly flexible tool for training battle staffs and individual soldiers at the tactical level,” said Mel Cape, senior knowledge engineer for TRADOC G2. “The recognition [the UT Dallas team] has received within the modeling and simulation community is well deserved, and we at TRISA are proud of their superlative efforts in the development of a culturally-based training device.”

Part of this cultural training is to familiarize soldiers with what they will face when arriving in their theaters of operation. Researchers worked to make the game’s characters look, sound and act as much as possible like people from the culture they represent.

The project offers virtual villages for soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan to practice their training skills.

In the game, the player enters a community from the first-person point of view.  He doesn’t know much about the community, how the people feel about him, or who the key figures are in the village. The goal is to move through the community and try to understand the social structures and issues, then address those issues and work with the community to affect missions.

The people in the community form opinions about the player based on how the player treats them.  If the player doesn’t interact properly with them, the villagers discuss his behavior among themselves.  Some individuals in the village have more clout than others.

The player collects information based on verbal and non-verbal cues he observes in the characters he encounters and then rates those characters based on a scale of four emotions: anger, fear, gladness and neutrality.

One of the most rewarding aspects of this program for Zielke is the opportunity to help her students make connections within the industry. “Between this project and other similar projects in the ATEC program, we have at least 30 students employed at any given time,” she said. “The students develop great portfolios, gain work experience, go to conferences, write research papers based on an incredibly rich data set and then hopefully leverage all of those things to get industry jobs.”