3DGS in Scientific Research

Forgive me if this isn't an appropriate forum for this topic, but I at least thought it was the least inappropriate As mentioned elsewhere, I've been using GameStudio to develop a 3D spatial navigation task for use with various neuroimaging modalities (MEG, EEG, fMRI). After talking to user carlpa about our experiences using this engine in research - mainly on its timing capabilities - We thought it would be a neat idea to see how many of you 15000+ people on these forums have used this engine for scientific research. What are your thoughts and experiences, and what type of research have you done?

I'm currently working with NRC Institute for Biodiagnostics on a study with the focus of localization and lateralization of language and memory areas in presurgical epilepsy patients. The task I'm developing a series of short first-person mazes designed to elicit (typically) right hippocampal activation as subjects use allocentric spatial navigation techniques. Later it will be integrated with another task I've developed which is a simple memory game intended to elicit activation related to verbal working memory. When the two are eventually combined we should have a single paradigm for localization of working memory for both language and spatial skills. With this and the localization of epileptogenic regions which are the cause of patients' epilepsy symptoms, we will be able to provide a comprehensive presurgical evaluation, done almost entirely with GameStudio!

How many more of you are out there? I'd love to hear about what you're doing and how you're using the engine to accomplish it!

I used the engine three times for scientific research and/or student projects.

The first time I used it in a linguistics course about symnolic and statistical text processing methods to visualize syntax trees in Latex-notation:

http://www.christian-behrenberg.de/work/SynView.html

It is only a visualization tool but it was great for me to use Gamestudio in a serious context.

The second and third encounter was during my bachelor thesis research. I created a statistical Bayes-classifier with color histograms for CIE-Lab, HSV, HS(/V) and RGB colorspace(s) for skin- and non-skin color distributions from a huge database (Compaq Database, Jones/Rheg). To get a feeling, if I have done the code for building my histograms right I wrote in Gamestudio a parser and used the new particle instancing feature for this.

The only image I have left is this (I could generate new images of course, but my histogram data format changed from text to binary, since I didn't normalized them (for some good reasons) and therefore the files became VERY huge after sampling the whole database.. ~854 million samples for non-skin- and 80 million samples for skin-color-tupels!)):


The achievement of my thesis was an algorithm to derive the head pose of a single person in an arbirtray video stream and I used Gamestudio to sync and save my approximation (x,y,scale,rotation) during a video with a 3D avatar head for the final presentation at the institute I was working at.



So, nothing special. But as I said, I was very glad to use Gamestudio for other things than games

As noted above, I am using GS to look at the difference between simple and choice reaction times tests. There is data that suggests reaction time measures may be useful in following disease progression i.e. MS. I am delighted to discover others using GS for research and education.