Michael Urbanek

senior lecturer research assistant postdoc

Michael Urbanek is a young-at-heart researcher whose focus is on game design, or rather audio games. Audio games are computer games whose main focus is on sound, using as few visual aids as possible. He is active as a lecturer and researcher at various universities in Austria. In his free time he pursues various hobbies, including sports, playing computer games and watching trash TV.

Forschungsinteressen/Research Interests

Audio Games (Games with no visuals), Games, Haptic Interfaces, Interaction Interfaces, Sound, Sound Models, Tangible Interfaces, Virtual Reality

Contact

Argentinierstraße 8, 2. Stock A-1040 Vienna, Austria

Sprechstunde: Di 10:15–12:00

Research areas for supervision of theses:

  • audio game design & development
  • game design & development

Education/Ausbildung

  • Diplom-Ingenieur (Dipl.-Ing.), Medieninformatik, TU Wien, focus on: Audio Games, 2015.
  • Master of Science (MSc), Multimedia und Softwareentwicklung, Technikum Wien, focus on: Playtesting, 2013.
  • Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Online Medien, Hochschule Furtwangen, Germany, 2012.
  • Bachelor of Arts in Business (BA), Projektmanagement und IT, FH des BFI Wien, 2012.
  • Current Position: Research Assistant (TU Wien)

Publications

peer-reviewed:

  • Urbanek, M., & Güldenpfennig, F., & Schrempf, M. T. (2018, June). A Community of Audio Game Designers - Towards an Online Audio Game Editor. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (in press). ACM.
  • Urbanek, M., Fikar, P., & Güldenpfennig, F. (2018, May). About the Sound of Bananas - Anti Rules for Audio Game Design. In Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE 6th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH) (in press). IEEE.
  • Urbanek, M., & Güldenpfennig, F. (2017, July). Rethinking Prototyping for Audio Games: On Different Modalities in the Prototyping Process. In Proceedings of the 31st International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2017).
  • Güldenpfennig, F. & Nunes, F. & Subasi, Ö. & Urbanek, M. (2017, July). UbiKit: Learning to Prototype for Tangible and Ubiquitous Computing. In Proceedings of the 31st International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2017).
  • Urbanek, M., & Güldenpfennig, F. (2017, March). Tangible Audio Game Development Kit: Prototyping Audio Games with a Tangible Editor. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 473-479). ACM.
  • Urbanek, M., Fikar, P., Ganhör, R., Habiger, M., & Tellioglu, H. (2017, March). Vibrette: Aiding Smoke Cessation with Tangible Game Devices. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 537-542). ACM.
  • Podkosova, I., Urbanek, M., & Kaufmann, H. (2016, May). A Hybrid Sound Model for 3D Audio Games with Real Walking. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (pp. 189-192). ACM.

other:

  • Urbanek, M. (2017, July). Challenges in the Design and Implementation of Audio Games: An Investigation of the Audio Games Design Process. Doctoral Consortium @ 31st International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2017).

Skillz

  • science: Ideation, Prototyping, Development, User Research
  • writing: LaTeX, LyX
  • programming: C++, C#, OpenGL, Java, JavaScript, PHP, CSS
  • game engines: Unity3D
  • playing games (2018): Vermintide II, SMITE, GWENT, Hearthstone

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