About the program
The MIT.nano Immersion Lab Gaming Program is a four-year collaboration between MIT.nano and NCSOFT, a video game development company based in South Korea. The program seeks to chart the future of how people interact with the world and each other via hardware and software innovations in gaming technology.
As part of the collaboration, NCSOFT provided funding to acquire the hardware and software tools to outfit the MIT.nano Immersion Lab as a research and collaboration space for investigations in artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, artistic projects, and other explorations at the intersection of hard tech and human beings. The program, set to run for four years, offers annual seed grants to MIT faculty and researchers for projects in science, technology, and applications of:
- Gaming in Research and Education
- Communication Paradigms
- Technology for Human-level Inference
- Technology for Data Analysis and Visualization
NCSOFT is a founding member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The program launched in April 2019. Since then there have been two rounds of seed grants awarded. Read about the recipients from 2019, 2020, and 2021.
NCSOFT Seed Grants
NCSOFT is a founding member of the MIT.nano Consortium. The Program launched in April 2019 and announced the first seed grant awards in September 2019.
The first recipients of seed grants from the program, awarded in Fall 2019, are:
- Stefanie Mueller: Connecting the virtual and physical world
- Wojciech Matusik: Using phase-only holograms
- Luca Daniel and Micha Feigin-Almon: Replicating human movements in virtual characters
- D. Fox Harrell: Teaching socially impactful behavior
- Juejun Hu: Displaying a wider field of view in high resolution
Read more about the first NCSOFT seed grants at MIT News.
The second round of seed grants were awarded in Fall 2020:
- Mohammad Alizadeh: A neural-enhanced teleconferencing system
- Luca Daniel: Dance-inspired models for representing intent
- Frédo Durand: Inverse rendering for photorealistic computer graphics and digital avatars
- Jeehwan Kim: Electronic skin-based long-term imperceptible and controller-free AR/VR motion tracker
- Will Oliver: Qubit arcade
- Jay Scheib: Augmenting opera: “Parsifal”
- Justin Solomon: AI for designing usable virtual assets
Read more about the 2020 seed grants at MIT News.
The third round of seed grants were awarded in Fall 2021:
- Ian Condry: Innovations in spatial audio and immersive sound
- Robert Hupp: Immersive athlete-training technology and data-driven coaching support in fencing
- Jeehwan Kim: Next-generation human/computer interface for advanced AR/VR gaming