CSE - Development and Testing of Interactive Software
The Spring 2026 research opportunities in the GESS Lab involve further development of interactive tools (including test applications) for future publication. Current projects in the lab involve optimization workflow with streaming between devices, and a new formalized approach to dense collision problems within virtual worlds. Additional research opportunities in this semester would be for tailoring usability of interactive software -- e.g., benchmarking the degree of interactivity and maximizing content driven by user experience studies/practices.
Within the ongoing research projects, students can participate in a well-explored domain of literature reviews and established codebase to both extend demonstrations, tools, and continue work on a paper publication. The project has an outstanding team of prior RAs that are available for onboarding questions and well as to assist in shared writing through Overleaf.
For research in interactive software usability, students will be exploring the frametime consistency of 3D interactive software to measure moments of detrimental impact within a logic loop. On top of this, students will study and analyze metrics for UX to apply the meaningfulness of components that have significant costs to frametime's and wherein deviations from a consistent frametime might be an exception by remaining beneficial to the overall experience.
Meetings will occur once (twice if needed) weekly following a Scrum and AGILE-like workspace. The meetings will include both brainstorming and reductionism for a set tasks for the following week. Sustained work intervals are expected to keep up with the steady developments required in these types of projects. While research practices will be applied in these projects, this is also a software-based role. As such, the experience provided will be similar to an R&D role where some of the time will be dictated by literature reviews, planning best on proposals of best practices, and validation through software development and testing.
The Game Engines and Simulation Systems (GESS) lab is focused on building compelling new tools for interactive applications. Tools and practices found in video game development extend to other real-world applications and problem solving skills as game engines are simulators which try to maximize compute based on combinations of numerical methods and algorithms deployed. By building tools and solving problems within the scope of interactive software, soft/hard real-time constraints require exploration of high-performance compute and changing hardware architectures to understand how best to approach software development.