Sammy Studios Donates To UCSD's Experimental Game Lab

The University of California, San Diego has announced a gift of more than $290,000 from Sammy Studios, Inc., made to support UCSD’s Experimental Game Lab (EGL) at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). The Carlsbad, California-based game developer and publisher, a subsidiary of Japan-headquartered Sega Sammy Holdings gave the donation to help the EGL's academic research on issues relevant to next-generation platforms, such as persistent evolving multi-user on-line worlds, streaming media within games, on-demand asset derivation, soft body dynamics for character development, rendering techniques, and prototyping technologies. Sammy Studios will also provide the EGL with the cost-free use of its game engine, SCORE, which will be incorporated into new artistic projects involving graduate and undergraduate students from the university’s Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts (ICAM) program, the fastest growing undergraduate major at UCSD. In a similar way to the movie industry's donations toward film schools, video game companies are increasingly donating to university game development programs, with Electronic Arts' recent multi-million dollar donations to the University of Central Florida and the University of Southern California the most visible examples of this trend.