Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

About

This eScholarship site hosts projects made by students in the UCSC Games and Playable Media program from 2019 to 2024. Year made, course number, and student creators are listed for each entry.

Department of Computational Media

There are 57 publications in this collection, published between 2014 and 2025.
Department of Computational Media Open Access Policy Deposits (57)

Implementing QR codes in academia to improve sample tracking, data accessibility, and traceability in multicampus interdisciplinary collaborations.

The growing number of multicampus interdisciplinary projects in academic institutions expedites a necessity for tracking systems that provide instantly accessible data associated with devices, samples, and experimental results to all collaborators involved. This need has become particularly salient with the COVID pandemic when consequent travel restrictions have hampered in person meetings and laboratory visits. Minimizing post-pandemic travel can also help reduce carbon footprint of research activities. Here we developed a Quick Response (QR) code tracking system that integrates project management tools for seamless communication and tracking of materials and devices between multicampus collaborators: one school of medicine, two engineering laboratories, three manufacturing cleanroom sites, and three research laboratories. Here we aimed to use this system to track the design, fabrication, and quality control of bioelectronic devices, in vitro experimental results, and in vivo testing. Incorporating the tracking system into our project helped our multicampus teams accomplish milestones on a tight timeline via improved data traceability, manufacturing efficiency, and shared experimental results. This tracking system is particularly useful to track device issues and ensure engineering device consistency when working with expensive biological samples in vitro and animals in vivo to reduce waste of biological and animal resources associated with device failure.

Designing Spellcasters from Clinician Perspectives: A Customizable Gesture-Based Immersive Virtual Reality Game for Stroke Rehabilitation

Developing games is time-consuming and costly. Overly clinical therapy games run the risk of being boring, which defeats the purpose of using games to motivate healing in the first place [ 10 , 23 ]. In this work, we adapt and repurpose an existing immersive virtual reality (iVR) game, Spellcasters, originally designed purely for entertainment for use as a stroke rehabilitation game—which is particularly relevant in the wake of COVID-19, where telehealth solutions are increasingly needed [ 4 ]. In preparation for participatory design sessions with stroke survivors, we collaborate with 14 medical professionals to ensure Spellcasters is safe and therapeutically valid for clinical adoption. We present our novel VR sandbox implementation that allows medical professionals to customize appropriate gestures and interactions for each patient’s unique needs. Additionally, we share a co-designed companion app prototype based on clinicians’ preferred data reporting mechanisms for telehealth. We discuss insights about adapting and repurposing entertainment games as serious games for health, features that clinicians value, and the potential broader impacts of applications like Spellcasters for stroke management.

A Unified Approach to Preserving Cultural Software Objects and their Development Histories

This white paper was made possible with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Start-Up GrantHD-51719-13.

54 more worksshow all