Newby Chinese conference paper

Newby Chinese is a gamified system for learning Mandarin Chinese in a fun way, initially in a supervised classroom environment. I have been working on this with my friend and project collaborator Richard McCurry since 2016, and Richard’s core concept (which was always very engaging) has, in the last 9 months or so, really fleshed out and taken shape as a set of minigames and challenges tied together into competitive multiplayer races. Our first customer (a secondary school) starts using Newby Chinese in a couple of weeks time.

Last week we presented a paper at an academic conference – IEEE Games, Entertainment & Media. This included a demo of some of the interactive multiplayer minigames which make up our learning system. It went really well, and the 20 or so participants found it very engaging. My heavily-cached Ajax-and-Websockets NodeJs server performed exactly as I had hoped.

For more details and discussion you can download our full IEEE GEM conference paper here.
You can try a demo of Newby Chinese here.
The main Newby Chinese website is here.

Lie2Me / Fool Me Once

Last week I co-presented a paper in which we discussed two related research projects: Lie2Me and Fool Me Once. In these, I’ve been working with Denis O’Hora, a colleague in NUIG who works in the Psychology Dept. We’re investigating the dynamic body-language features which are apparent when users are lying, and as part of this we had an installation for 3 months in the Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin.

Our continuing work will, among other things, perhaps lead to useful applications in games artificial intelligence (AI), whereby AI agents can act more human-like, perhaps through mimicry or perhaps through deeper analytical “understanding” of human actions. My related work from 2011 was in the field of pathfinding in my car combat MMO “Darkwind“.

You can download our research paper here.
You can participate in the Lie2Me experiment here.