SOCO - Creator Game

Closed Human-Computer Interaction Computer Science Games Engineering Bachelor Master Project Thesis Games Research Lab

Background

Originally inspired by nest construction in social insects, the concept of self-organised construction (SOCO) relies on a large number of agents that coordinate their construction efforts by prompting and reacting to local stimuli. Very recently, with the wake of robotic swarms and novel material processing approaches, including for instance 3D printing techniques and innovative deployment of carbon fibres, self-organising construction is quickly gaining tremendous transformative significance in the context of various design and construction processes [1]. These include also the construction, exten- sion and renovation of architectural buildings, engineering design, industrial assembly and manufacture, and landscape architecture. One important challenge in SOCO is the interface between technical self-organisation and goals set by its human user, or beneficiary [2].

Tasks

In the scope of this work, the student sets out to explore this border between technical automation and creative, user-driven guidance. The student is supposed to design an immersive environment (HTC Vive or Oculus & Touch), where the user can command swarms of (flying) construction robots (similar to [3]). The constructed artefacts are comprised of sets of construction elements dropped by the swarm individuals. The shapes of the constructions directly result from the movement and construction behaviour of the swarm individuals. Yet, the user can influence both, for instance by placing attraction beacons, by swapping swarm agents for those with different behaviours, by placing construction elements himself, etc. [4]. Once the UIs and game mechanics are in place, a game needs to be implemented that challenges the player’s ability to grow artefacts in virtual reality. Straight forward approaches for a scalable game concept would consider limits of the resources in terms of the available agent types, the number of deployable agents, the types of available construction elements, the number of deployable construction elements, and time. The player could score higher, if he achieved to recreate certain predefined shapes or if the swarm and its construction interacted with the environment in certain ways. For instance, the artefact might have to grow high enough to reach an energy boost to ensure that the swarm could keep building etc. In external playtests, swarm player player activity should be logged to conduct a usability analysis. A discussion of the results should shed light on the interdependency between self-organisation and player interference.

Prerequisites

A background in games, human-computer interaction, and development with game engines is a great asset for this work.

References

[1] Victor Gerling and Sebastian von Mammen. Robotics for self-organised construction. In Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE 1st International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems, pages 156–165, Augsburg, Germany, September 2016. IEEE Computer Society.

[2] Sebastian von Mammen. Self-organisation in games, games on self-organisation. In Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-Games), 2016 8th International Conference on, pages 1–8. IEEE, 2016.

[3] Sebastian von Mammen and Sarah Edenhofer. Swarm grammars gd: Interactive exploration of swarm dynamics and structural development. In Hod Lipson et al., editor, ALIFE 14: The International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, pages 312–320. ACM, MIT press, 2014.

[4] Sebastian von Mammen and Christian Jacob. The evolution of swarm grammars: Growing trees, crafting art and bottom-up design. IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, 4:10–19, August 2009.

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