Viz News

Reeling from too much Red Bull and bleary-eyed from sleep depravation, student game designers lumbered out of the Memorial Student Center at Texas A&M University at the end of Chillennium 2017, a world record-setting, student-led game design competition.

Student video game designers will vie for a Guinness World Record as they design games from scratch in just 48 hours at Chillennium 2017, an Oct. 13-15, 2017 event hosted by the Texas A&M Department of Visualization.

Texas A&M graduate visualization students spent the summer creating four virtual reality games from scratch with guidance from industry experts at Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB, an industry leader in Immersive Entertainment production.

The 19th annual College of Architecture Research Symposium, “Natural, Built, Virtual,” is set for Oct. 23 in the Langford Architecture Center’s Preston Geren Auditorium. It showcases research and creative work by college faculty and doctoral students.

André Thomas, a visualization professor, who is leading an effort to establish video games as an educational tool in universities and high schools, has been tapped to join the advisory board of the National Academy of Sciences’ Koshland Public Engagement Program.

To investigate the viability of micro-manufacturing in the United States, the National Science Foundation tapped Francis Quek, professor of visualization at Texas A&M, as one of 23 recipients of a $100,000 Convergence Award.

An essay spotlighting prominent artist and critic Donald Judd’s use of sculpture and prose to elevate architecture in his hometown, Kansas City, earned its author, Susanneh Bieber, assistant professor of visualization, recognition from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Researchers at Texas A&M are working to illuminate the computational reasoning process, why algorithms reach the conclusions they do, as part of a four-year, $1.6 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense that explores new technologies.

Video games and virtual reality environments developed by former Texas A&M visualization students contended for top prizes in the final round of “The Rookies,” a global competition for young designers, creators, innovators and artists.