Ubisoft, Université de Montréal to make videogames less frustrating

Future titles from videogame maker Ubisoft Entertainment will analyze players’ skill levels to automatically adjust the game's difficulty. The development comes in part from a new partnership between the company, the Université de Montréal and the federal government. On March 15, Ubisoft announced that it joined forces with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to create the NSERC-Ubisoft industrial research chair on learning representations for immersive video games at the Université de Montréal. NSERC is a federal agency that aims to connect university researchers and commercial organizations. Ubisoft and NSERC are each funding the chair with $200,000 per year over five years, for a grand total of $2 million. Under Yoshua Bengio, the chair holder and a professor of computer science at the university, and Yves Jacquier, executive director of Ubisoft’s Montreal production studio, about 30 students specializing in “machine learning” will work with Ubisoft engineers to tackle videogame software challenges. Machine learning explores the ways in which machines take in and adapt to new information. “There is a movement within the gaming industry right now towards machine-learning technology, because they have sensed the potential of improving the game play in various ways,” Bengio said in an interview. The group's project has three goals: collect data for an improved player experience; develop techniques to give artists and 3D animators the ability to make video content for game consoles; and share information to help videogame developers be more productive. Bengio will explore how to use machine learning to better understand players' strengths, weaknesses and styles of play to improve the gaming experience. “One thing we’re working on is giving feedback to new players who are often discouraged because the game doesn’t work very well for them,” Bengio said. Jacquier said the goal is to develop technology that allows the game to adapt to the player’s skill level, so that the game is optimally challenging without being frustrating. The group is also working on another application to help players build better balanced teams in multi-player games, so that opposing teams are more evenly matched. The research is also meant to aid videogame production, such as improving on ways to extract information from motion-capture systems. Motion-capture controllers like Microsoft’s Kinect are already on the market, but “there’s a lot of room for improving these things,” Bengio said. Today’s systems capture relatively large movements like when a player moves their arms or legs, Bengio said. “Eventually, when the technology progresses, you’ll be able to make signals with your face and your voice, and your fingers,” he said. “Any type of movement could be interpreted by the machine and give a signal of what you want the character to do. It makes the game feel more like virtual reality.” The research is expected to be implemented into Ubisoft's games by 2012, the company said in a release last week. But Jacquier noted by phone that Ubisoft and the university have been working together for a couple of years. He said some of the company's games scheduled for debut at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles in June will sport enhancements so far derived from the collaboration. For competitive reasons, Jacquier could not disclose which titles will feature the research-based enhancements, but hinted at a change for Ubisoft’s fitness game, Your Shape Fitness Evolved. The game now features a level of artificial intelligence to assess the player’s fitness abilities and suggest appropriate exercises. Future releases could go further. “Imagine we’re able to measure your performance, or how tired you are,” Jacquier said. “We might be able to propose the right exercise at the right moment, and the most personalized coaching experience.” Bengio said the raw research data comes from deployment tests: videogame makers hire people to play their games before they’re released to figure out what works for gamers and what doesn’t. Researchers will also look at information from online games, including details such as who had the highest score, and the style of play people used. Janet Walden, NSERC’s vice-president of research partnerships programs, said in an interview that it made sense for the government agency to fund the chair proposal because it aligned with NSERC’s goal of building bridges between post-secondary researchers and Canadian businesses. Industrial chairs help accelerate the flow of knowledge from research into businesses, Walden said. It fosters a stronger base for future research ideas and students can go on to work for Ubisoft or other companies, sharing their smarts with the corporate community. And videogame makers seek fast access to the latest research. “When you look at an area like video gaming where the turnover in technology is really rapid, you want access to those new ideas as they come out,” Walden said. Ubisoft, as one of the chair’s stakeholders, will have first dibs on research that the project produces. But the intellectual property rules of NSERC’s industrial chair program mandate that researchers publish papers so that the information is available to the entire videogame industry, Walden said. news@thewirereport.ca

Ubisoft, Université de Montréal to make videogames less frustrating

Broadcast | March 25, 2011

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