in a recent research project, the concept for an urban exploration game with the working title »schauma« (viennese german for »lets look«) has been developed.
in this game, vantage points in the city act similarily to the towers in a typical open world game like assassins’ creed or recent zelda titles. by visiting the vantage point, you not only get a great look over the city, but also unlock a part of the map and some perks of the city, eg. outstanding works of street art, libraries, recommended places, etc.
there is a prototype implementation based on OSM and open data. it has primarily shown the many problems that have to be solved in order to make this an interesting game (or gameful experience). also, there are some additional goals, eg. to nudge people towards sustainable modes of travel.
the goal of this master thesis for one or two students is to design, implement and evaluate a first version of such an app for both dominant phone OS platforms together with the supervision team.
the goal for this master thesis for 1 or 2 students is to develop a specialized software for site inspection procedures. the goal of the software is to give personell a well-designed and efficient tool to conduct site inspection on safety, security and ergonomics. an colleague from TU GUT (buildings and technology) service unit will be available as an expert for user needs and overall organizational context. the work should be finished within a year. the final product should be ready to use for real inspections, should be well-documented and free of AI-generated code.
according to an expert from a TU internal service unit, there is no existing solution that is usable and functionally satisfying, so this project even opens an opportunity to turn the resulting software into a commercial product.
(alternatively, this project can be tackled as a bachelor thesis in the sense that a structured design, sketching/prototyping & user testing process is conducted until the app is well defined and ready to be implemented.)
in this master thesis for one or two students, an web-based external tool for tuwel/moodle for research-diary-like journalling will be designed. the goal is to allow teachers to specify constraints and offer templates for such an activity. students then can write entries on a pre-scheduled basis into the journal. the tool should also allow evaluation of student’s work, eg. give an overview over completed writing assignments and offer grading scales.
this tool will be used in summer term 2027 for the course »gameful design«; this can be used as a basis for evaluation and improvement of the tool.
i am having a short break from TU wien. i will return in fall 2024, probably with all-new topics then. for now, this place is closed.
for this master thesis for one or two candidates we – prof. fares kayali and me – are looking for someone who wants to explore the crossover between a virtual lab in gather.town and a real lab at the center for teacher education at uni wien. an example for such a crossover would be an electronic whiteboard that is shared between the real space and the gather.town lab. the thesis comprises of user research, design and implementation of a prototype, and evaluation.
