Perttu Hämäläinen

1/4 Join us and the Autotelic Interaction Research (AIR) group @aalto.fi / Finland to work on Computational Social Intrinsic Motivation (SIM) as PhD (4y) or postdoc (2y). Job ad w project description and application instructions: bit.ly/4jyNLGv. We're looking forward to learning about you!

YouTube video by SoulsVRFDG Souls-VR: Dodge-Rolling in Virtual Reality

New ways to adapt non-VR games to VR, without motion sickness:

Markus Kirjonen et al.: Souls-VR: Dodge-Rolling in Virtual Reality.

Paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...,
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGfi...

New game design theory and a dataset of emotionally impactful game feel designs:

Prabhav Bhatnagar et al.: Beyond Satisfaction: Game Feel Design for Emotionally Impactful Experiences (Early career best paper award!) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

New papers: FDG 2025 proceedings are finally out and I'm super proud and excited about these two 🧵

Can gaming support mental health? Researchers to present Dark Souls study at CHI '25 | Aalto University A well-known role-playing videogame is helping players cope with real-world challenges like depression, say researchers from Aalto University.

Press release on our Dark Souls and depression study. www.aalto.fi/en/news/can-...

Aalto's game design Itch page updated: aalto-gamedesign.itch.io

Game Poems Magazine - Submit Submit to Game Poems

Jordan Magnuson's Game Poems Magazine "intent to submit" deadline approaching www.gamepoems.org/submit

A nice structured collection of AI papers github.com/FoundationAg...

YouTube video by Cascadeur Inbetweening | Cascadeur 2025.1 Feature Highlights

Cascadeur (animation software) adds AI-driven inbetweening. This looks promising, as with their physics-based editing features, it should be easy to finetune the result, e.g., adjust how heavy or light the movement feels. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GNX...

From the IndieDev community on Reddit: I spent over 7 years developing a game all by myself. Now that no one is playing it, I realize how much it actually affects me. Explore this post and more from the IndieDev community

A good thread on indie game marketing. Might be worth checking out the Steam page now and again later to see how the OP has implemented the advice given by others www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/s...

My first "fanboy" game research paper (CHI 2025)! I'm a huge Dark Souls and Elden Ring fan and in this paper, we study how DS players discuss depression on Reddit. I developed the AI-assistance part of the analysis process. acris.aalto.fi/ws/portalfil...

Lovely math & graphics wizardry 😍

Today’s game design teaching materials

Abishek Jaiswal (game designer/developer at Valo Motion, an Aalto games graduate) gave a super nice talk yesterday about designing Valo Motion's games where the players see their own bodies inside the game world www.twitch.tv/videos/23959...

ELDEN RING: Shadow of Erdtree (bitsy ver. ) by yrannn Explore the shadow realm in 8-bit style!! (all lores & no battle)

This made my day: An Elden Ring demake in Bitsy 😍 The art captures the original's atmosphere incredibly well. yrannn.itch.io/bitsy-elden-...

We're seeking new HCI faculty. Would be great to have more HCI & Games colleagues, please apply! www.aalto.fi/en/open-posi...

Why does it undermine teachers? Teaching materials should be shared openly anyway. I distribute all of mine via Github.

A really cool paper on why transformers need coordinate-wise adaptive learning rate openreview.net/pdf/32bac765...

I'll get straight to the point.

We trained 2 new models. Like BERT, but modern. ModernBERT.

Not some hypey GenAI thing, but a proper workhorse model, for retrieval, classification, etc. Real practical stuff.

It's much faster, more accurate, longer context, and more useful. 🧵

YouTube video by Perttu Hämäläinen Unpublished Kinect melee combat prototype from 2011

Another unpublished Kinect prototype from 2011. This was a blast to work on—the combat managed to feel powerful and fluid. I’m the test player in the red shirt.

Also my first Unity project (Unity 3.5, we previously worked with Gamebryo and Phyre)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH0U...

YouTube video by Perttu Hämäläinen Unpublished physics-based Kinect game prototypes from 2011

Found this video of my physics-based Kinect prototypes from 2011, got a permission to upload. Still quite proud of some, wondering if there’s something to reuse/adapt for Quest 3. youtu.be/meP8jvv5kHc?...

Yay, a bi-decennial website update! users.aalto.fi/~hamalap5/

Meta Llama 3.3 LLM out. Beats gpt-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 at a fraction of the token cost and is open source. www.llama.com

Disclaimer: I’d like AI to clean and do the dishes, not replace human creative work. But whatever we use AI for, I’d prefer it to be open source.

Aalto Media Lab Demo Day 2024 | Media Lab 30 Years Exhibition Opening | Aalto University Aalto Media Lab Demo Day highlights the work from the students and faculty of the Aalto Media Lab.

Aalto Media Lab Demo Day Wed 11 Dec, 1pm, at the new and awesome Marsio event studio, Aalto University campus. This is also the opening of the 30 year anniversary exhibition. www.aalto.fi/en/events/aa...

Fig. 3 ❤️

Bluesky is truly having an incredible run as Threads' head of product

Intermezzo An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and fami…

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney was exactly what I needed during these dark times. Made me cry with empathic joy, multiple times. www.goodreads.com/book/show/20...

X pushes a 40% discount of the ”verified” subscription desperately, with a full-screen ad pop-up where the close button is hidden until one scrolls down.

Elon must be feeling the exodus 😂

Thanks! Just watched it — always great to learn about new aspects of games.

Someone called this mass exodus from Twitter ‘the fall of the Broman Empire’ and I died laughing. 💀