Research Advising

USC Games

As USC Games faculty, I am lucky to have the opportunity to mentor five graduate students in domains including game development kits (GDKs), HLSL shaders, and computer vision for 3D applications. Their research projects are summarized below.

Handheld Game Consoles

Several students were interested in building a complete handheld gaming system including the hardwdare, software, and the integration of the two. The handheld console is inspired by the Playdate, Game Boy Advance, and Tamagotchi. The goal is to design a pocketable, low power, and specialized gaming computer.

In Spring 2025, the research group prototyped the electrical componenet and the encasing of the console. The project required working with SwiftIO, writing the OS, and developing with a series of libraries (graphic, UI, game library, and sound). Our next step after developing the gaming system will be to begin developing games for the system. To conclude the project, we will work to produce a research paper on our findings regarding how to engineer a complete gaming system from idea to prototype to production.

Areas of focus:

1. Development Environment Setup / CAD Environment Setup
2. Graphic Library Development (Primitiives) / Component Sourcing & Breadbroad Prototyping
3. Graphic Library Development (Text) / PCB Design for Child Boards
4. UI Library Development (Layout) / Casing Design for Prototype System
5. UI Library Development (Animation) / Casing Design for Prototype System
6. System UI / Assembly and Prototype System Finalization
7. Game Library Development (ECS) / Handheld Design Sketchup
8. Game Library Development (Sprite) / Unique Hardware Feature Prototyping

HLSL and Unity Shaders

For this research project, we investigated Unity's Shader system with ShaderGraph, HLSL, and rendering techniques. We dove into foundational shader programming, render pipelines, advanced shader techniques, visual effects, post-processing, and stylized rendering.

Our goal was to see how we can enhance the visual aesthetics of 3D game environments with visual effects and through different ways of creating Shaders with Unity. These effects were then applied to the AGP project, Myth of Lumi.