Thursday: I was a bit late in applying for the visum for China so I needed to go to there in person. Need to prepare my talk on Empathic Lighting for Friday. Saturday: preparing my invited talk for China and go to Ronald (Poppe) and Sophie’s (van der Zee) wedding party. Sunday: fly to China. Monday (actually 3 hours after landing) present the talk… Luckily I could spend a few more days in China. I had asked to see some contemporary art and that is what I got. AMAZING. It was nice to see the works by the students graduating from the college of arts. Only to return home and then travel to Paris for a meeting of the Aria Valuspa project. Prolonging the stay for a few days to visit the wonderful Cluny museum for the first time. (Also enjoyed Karel Appel’s retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art, and the food of course…)

My PhD student, Jeroen Linssen successfully defended his thesis on Meta Matters in Interactive Storytelling and Serious Games (A play on Worlds).

From the press release: In this dissertation, I investigate the use of storytelling techniques in the domains of interactive storytelling and serious gaming. The field of interactive storytelling attempts to create and analyse systems that allow users to influence the plots of stories. Serious games provide experiences not solely for entertainment; in this dissertation, I investigate serious games with educational purposes. In both domains, I inspect how both human users and virtual agents (artificial, autonomous entities) can perceive stories.