Home page

Augmented Reality gaming promises new ways for humans to engage with their physical environment by overlaying gameplay elements via a head-mounted display. We present an artificial intelligence technique to automatically generate novel gameplay content for mixed-reality environments. We demonstrate the technique with a game we call "Augmented Reality Lemmings", a platform game in which the level content was procedurally generated.

Meditation has entered the digital sphere through apps, podcasts, and online videos. There have been attempts to use virtual reality, but these have focused on single session experiences. We took a user-centered approach to design and implement a VR system to teach people meditation and equip them with skills that can be used beyond the virtual environment. Our research focused on understanding how beginners learn meditation and how their needs could be met in VR. We used this data to create a multi-lesson VR meditation prototype which we then evaluated in a longitudinal lab-based deployment.

The Quixote system is an artificial intelligence technique for teaching robots and artificial virtual agents how to do things by telling them stories. Stories present a natural means of communicating complicated, tacit procedural knowledge. Quixote thus reads in natural language stories and learns to emulate the behaviors of the characters in the stories. The long term goal of the project is to make AI programming accessible to non-programmers and non-AI experts. We have also shown that stories can be an effective means of demonstrating ethical behavior to robots and AIs.