Cy Games and CREL Joint Research

In November 2017, Cygames Chief Technology Officer, Eitoshi Ashihara and director of Cygames Research, Prof. Shuichi Kurabayashi visited UC San Diego to establish a memorandum of understanding with Prof. Shlomo Dubnov, the director of CREL, and Prof. Ramesh Rao, the director of the Qualcomm Institute so as to establish a collaboration between CREL and Cygames Research.

The goal of this memorandum was to promote academic collaboration between Cygames and CREL to create an x-reality (mixed, blended, augmented reality) labs for long-term basic research and shared equipment and to provide cutting-edge content to entertain game players globally. Together, CREL and Cygames Research will collaborate to create artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that can be incorporated into Cygames’s game titles, as well as joint research focusing on mixed reality technologies that utilize smartphones and deep learning technologies for computer-generated/sound media. The collaboration will also include joint seminars and research conferences, publications and mutual visits.

“I consider it a great honor for Cygames Research — just two years old — to be able to engage in this sort of initiative with a world-class research university like UC San Diego,” said Kurabayashi. “Prof. Shlomo Dubnov, director of CREL, has been involved with joint research at Keio University [in Tokyo] for over a decade. Now that we have established this memorandum, we will be able to work together more deeply and actively, as well as develop innovative new forms of computer entertainment. I hope that this joint research will serve as a means for students, faculty, and staff of UC San Diego, as well as others in American academia, to become more familiar with Cygames, Inc.”

“The beauty of this agreement is that includes both aspects of creativity and technology,” said Prof. Dubnov. “As games become all-encompassing, interactive and social experiences, they will require increasingly creative content, which will allow students from the Humanities at UC San Diego to be trained in aspects of production related to games in regard to sound, visuals and storytelling. On the technology side, Cygames needs to be able to create virtual avatars, which requires computers to recognize gestures, machine listening, vocalization and mapping of objects. We have a big joint interest in developing applications of deep-learning and machine learning in general.”