The Department of Virtual Worlds and Digital Games is concerned with technologies, systems and occurrences of virtual and augmented realities (VR/AR/MR) as well as the individual manifestations of digital games (serious games, pervasive games, online games, mobile games, etc.). Their production, content and usage/adoption in particular with regard to their application-relevant potential are investigated and new applications are developed in an interdisciplinary (technology and social science based) approach.

Augmented Reality: We research technologies simplifying and extending the usage of AR. This includes computer vision based interaction techniques and markup languages for AR  user interfaces and object properties

Mobile Mixed Reality: The increasing availability of powerful mobile devices offers new opportunities for extending the users’ real environment by virtual content or even replacing it entirely. We research the necessary technologies as well as the effects of their usage.

Diminished Reality: We investigate in different computer vision based approaches for realizing Diminished Reality systems. During our research we already developed the world-wide first real-time capable Diminished Reality system.

Pervasive games / location based games: new forms of digital games beyond classical desktop and console games potentially allow players to be always and everywhere part of a collective game experience. This increasingly involves elements of their real environment such as locations, buildings, persons (players and non-players).

Social and (media) cultural significance of digital games: the qualitative and quantitative analysis of social interactions and methods of usage as well as the integration of computer games in our daily live and its individual as well as social implications.

Virtual worlds / Virtual Reality (VR): How can we develop virtual worlds and VR (as its corresponding interaction metaphor) for new user groups and novel application areas? How can we overcome existing media breaks when using VR?