MIT.nano, in collaboration with NCSOFT, a founding member of the MIT.nano industry consortium, is seeking research proposals for projects that will explore software and hardware innovations in gaming technologies—including sensors, 3D/4D data interaction and analysis, augmented and virtual reality. Proposed research should focus on technical development via experimental, theoretical, and/or computational discovery.
Applications are due May 25, 2019.
Download the Request for Proposal a full description and application information.
Advancing the power of play
Sample proposal topics could include, but are not limited to, science, technologies, and applications associated with game development, communications, human-level inferences, and data analysis. Areas of interest include:
- Detecting, or reducing the sense of dizziness or VR sickness that some users may experience when using immersive headsets
- Reducing the cost and improving the accuracy of marker-less video based motion capture in open space
- Automatic voice generation for game characters—generating voices and sounds of game characters based on their characteristics of physical appearance atrributes and emotional state
- Techniques for skeletal animation from normal single camera video clips
- Techniques for incorporating and measuring emotions in virtual characters’ facial animation
- Novel approaches for voice-originated communication in extremely noisy environments
- Techniques for detecting and learning personalized gestures for communicating intent or assigning gestures to an indicated action
- Learning event—scene, video lifelog, sporting event—descriptions and attributes, or story-lines, from recorded audio-video clips, and other muli-modal data:
- in the case of sporting events additional data streams include game data
- in the case of video lifelog additional data streams include GPS, motion, and so forth
- Approaches for automatic generation of logically sequenced micro-tasks from high-level description of a mission (a macro-task)
Funding
Funding will be provided to support all aspects of the project with anticipated funding levels ranging from $100,000 to $175,000 for a specified project duration. Project duration should generally be from 12 to 24 months and should be requested and defined as part of the proposal. After project term completion, additional funding may be available to extend promising projects.
Deadlines and Key Dates
April 25, 2019:
Mini workshop for NCSOFT technology leaders and MIT PIs.
May 25, 2019:
Deadline for proposals
June/July 2019:
Notification given to applicants
July/August 2019:
Funds become available to award recipients, also subject to OSP review process.
Application Process
Applications must include a project proposal and the project budget. Please submit both via email to sense.nano.seed@mit.edu. Any related questions can be raised via this email as well.