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ABOUT US

"DAE-Research offers an attractive information service for organizations facing challenges, for which game technology might offer a solution"

DAE-Research is the research cell of the bachelor study program Digital Arts and Entertainment of Howest Kortrijk, where both demand-driven applied research projects and applied research projects on its own initiative are set up.

The research projects are oriented on exploring new game, VFX, animation & film technology (hard- and software) and transferring that knowledge to the bachelor program as well as companies in different sectors. Besides entertainment purposes, technology can be used in multiple ways to stimulate innovation tracks in companies, social-profit organizations as well as a partner in research consortia.

What is applied research? Scientific findings from university and other research labs, combined with experts’ experiences in the respective professional field and expectations of the envisioned end users, are creatively translated into innovative solutions and prototypes. This offers a surplus value for achieving the goals within the industry and/or social impact.

In addition to projects on demand, DAE-Research also conducts exploratory research on its own initiative. Hereby, the potential surplus value of new technology, whether this is hardware or software, is mapped out to work out innovative solutions for the various sectors.

Recent research topics are linked to our 6 majors within the DAE bachelor program: game development, game graphics production, independent game production, interactive sound production, VFX and 3D animation.

Research topics include immersive technology (VR/AR) and metaverse, spatial computing, applied games, artificial intelligence, conversational AI, motion capture, immersive sound, pose estimation and body tracking, procedural 3D content and automation (Houdini, photogrammetry, …)

Do contact us for more information on project ideas.

OUR LATEST REEL

HIGHLIGHTED USE CASES

Bomenbos: Real time Virtual Camera
Credit to Sputnik for the behind the scene video of the Bomenbos project, where we experimented with a real-time virtual camera on-set while recording with real actors and a director. Some cool results, and lots of lessons learnt from this one.
Procedural Textile Generation
For this use case we ran into the challenge to create a workflow to procedurally create a photorealistic carpet. We used Houdini as it allows a great flexibility in rendering a variation of similar yet unique visuals of 3D elements.
Procedural Plant growth
There is an overlap between procedural generation and artificial intelligence. In addition to using AI to build procedural 3D models, procedural 3D can be used to train AI faster. AI algorithms need a large amount of annotated data to teach the algorithm what to do. Procedural 3D can help with this because it can generate a huge amount of annotated images with variations of the object.
A Very Wild Boar…

CONTACT US

Vicky Vermeulen – Research manager
vicky.vermeulen@howest.be

Jan Pauly – Project manager
jan.pauly@howest.be

Howest Campus The Level
Digital Arts & Entertainment

Botenkoperstraat 2
8500 Kortrijk
Belgium

Howest Campus The Square
Digital Arts & Entertainment Research Lab

Luipaardstraat 12A
8550 Kortrijk
Belgium