Virtual reality is all the rage in video gaming, and the University of Utah’s No. 1-ranked Entertainment Arts & Engineering (EAE) video game development program is exploring all the ways this hyper-realistic form of interactivity can be informative as well as fun.

Five new VR games and educational apps along with more than 30 other games will be on display during the new EAE Play! event, a showcase of the program’s student games under production this year, from high-octane shooting games to medical apps that help sufferers with conditions such as diabetes and autism. And for the first time, EAE is inviting the public to playtest the games and give feedback to the student designers.

EAE Play! will be held Friday, Dec. 9, from 1 to 5 p.m. in the top floor of the studio’s new home in the former law library, 332 S. 1400 East (free parking is available on the east side of the building). It is free and open to the public.

Some of the virtual reality games on display include:

Autism Choreographic Experience – This VR app helps young adults with autism understand spacial reasoning by allowing the user to conduct a school of fish in an underwater dance.

Augmented Reality Body Image – An app to help diagnose those who suffer from body-image disorder in which they use the Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality helmet to describe the size and shape of their body. This can help raise awareness of their true body shape.

Virtual Records – A VR app for sufferers of Type 2 Diabetes to help them visualize their data, for example, a graph of their blood glucose readings that is transformed into the peaks of a mountain.

After School – A first-person VR educational game for the Google Cardboard that strengthens vocabulary by helping kids learn to associate words with images.

Wrecked: Get Your Ship Together – A living room party game for VR that integrates the VR player with other players on their mobile phones.

Other games that will be available to demo include a first-person puzzle game, a combat cart racer, a virtual form of hide-and-seek, and an art-driven 3D simulator that “invokes discussion about the colorfulness and beauty of the world.”

EAE co-founder and executive director Robert Kessler, a professor in the University of Utah’s School of Computing, said organizers are allowing the public to playtest the student games for the first time to give student designers critical feedback on issues like gameplay, graphics and user interface.

“EAE students learn that game development is unique to other forms of software development because you don’t know if the game will be fun until someone actually plays it,” he says. “We are excited to invite the public behind the scenes of student game development to come out, test, and help improve dozens of games that our over 200 undergraduate and graduate students have been creating this year.”

The games represent the work of the program’s seniors, master’s students, and GApp Lab, which creates interactive software for education and medical applications. Most of the games are scheduled to be published next spring.

EAE is the No. 1 undergraduate school in the nation for studying game design, according to the latest survey by Princeton Review, and the EAE graduate program is ranked No. 3. EAE recently moved into its new home in the U’s former law library combining what was once three smaller studios on campus into one large, integrated studio on the top floor.

It’s just a 3D graphic of a porcelain teapot, but it became the legendary launching point for computer graphics throughout the world. The Salt Lake Tribune has written a history of the “Utah Teapot,” the digital computer model created in 1975 here at the University of Utah.

Martin Newell remembers that he and his wife, Sandra, weren’t in the habit of discussing his research when they sat for tea one weekend in 1975.

The British couple had moved to Salt Lake City so Newell could work under professor Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah — the home of countless breakthroughs underway and yet to come in computer graphics and animation.

But Newell suspects his wife held the common opinion “that this whole thing about drawing pictures with computers was a very strange thing to do.”

She might have found it stranger still, then, that her suggestion over tea that day would lead to one of the most iconic images in the history of his field: a digital version of her white porcelain teapot.

Researchers were just discovering how to create realistic digital shapes and surfaces, the first steps toward the virtual worlds being created by students today in the U.’s top-ranked video game design program.

Using the era’s improved hardware, researchers were trying to create digital versions of all sorts of objects. Sutherland and his students had notably used flat-surface polygons to model his 1967 Volkswagen Beetle.

Newell wanted to show the usefulness of another method of modeling — Bezier curves ­— and his wife suggested he use their tea set.

He sketched and plotted a spoon, saucer and cup, too, but none turned out to have the combination of properties possessed by the Melitta teapot they had bought from a ZCMI department store.

Among them: it cast a shadow on itself, it was round but didn’t have overly complex curves, and had a concave space created by its handle.

When Newell shared his data set, he gave other graphics researchers a starting point to test their own ideas. A designer who wanted to explore how shading can make an object appear more real could just start shading the teapot — without the tedium of first envisioning and creating another effective model.

And it was a universal starting point — people anywhere knew what a teapot was supposed to look like, and they could compare their illumination, reflection, shading and other refinements to the efforts of others.

What followed for the teapot, Newell said, was “the 1970s version of something going viral.”

Click here to read the whole article at The Salt Lake Tribune.