From Tetris to Minecraft, video games have long offered fans worldwide entertainment through problem-solving and world-building. In fact, many engineers felt their first passion for technology through video games.
The evolution of gaming and engineering are closely related. Engineers are catalysts for change and one way they impact the industry is by finding innovative solutions to improve user experience. The Metaverse and virtual reality (VR) are the latest ventures to reflect that innovation. As Mingzhe Chen, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, explained, “Engineers are very interested in the devices that the video game industry has pioneered.” Chen also added that “The college empowers students to understand these cutting-edge technologies and equips them to innovate the devices we need in the future.”
Video games and engineering drive tech innovation.
During the pandemic video games saw a huge boost. In 2021 alone, almost three billion users played video games and consumers spent approximately $44 billion in gaming software. Today, the industry continues to grow, attracting tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google to create their own services.
As the future continues to unfold, these new offerings will represent new opportunities for the engineering industry. “The video game industry is constantly evolving and launching new ways to connect and play video games. VR and cloud-based games are creating new opportunities for technology breakthroughs in engineering,” said Jie Xu, associate professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “In addition, video games use GPUs (graphics processing units) to power three-dimensional, high-resolution graphics. GPUs have become indispensable to personal computers and have enabled the last decade’s artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning revolution.”
The future of gaming and engineering
Cutting-edge platforms like augmented and virtual reality are used by engineers to help with design and production. Artificial intelligence is also a platform that offers many new opportunities for the industry. As Mohammed Abdel-Mottaleb, Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering explains, “AI will continue to play a vital role in video games. With the advancements it has had over the past decade, it is quite possible to see that in the future video games will contain characters that behave intelligently and mimic humans both individually and as a group in ways the game designers have never imagined.”
Today, Miami Engineering works to push the frontiers of technology and perception. According to Sakhrat Khizroev, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, “We're working on creating a wireless brain-machine interface (BMI). While this may sound a little crazy and scary, wireless BMI could erase the boundary between real life and virtual reality. It’s hard to imagine the full impact of this technology. For example, gamers could be able to play using only their imagination. Potentially, people could become connected to the entire internet, almost instantaneously learning anything–from a foreign language to quantum physics.”
