Josef Spjut

Research Interests

Josef's current research interests include competitive video games (or esports), real time computer graphics, and human performance. Online video games in particular create a novel set of human-to-human interactions enabled by computing and simulated worlds.

Bio

Josef Spjut is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Game Design, Development & Innovation Master of Engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and a Research Scientist at NVIDIA. His current research interests include online gaming including esports and competitive gaming. His past work included ray tracing hardware, virtual and augmented reality hardware and user experience, computer graphics, and display technology.

Education

• B.S. University of California, Riverside, 2006
• Ph.D. University of Utah, 2015

Positions

• Adjunct Associate Professor in the Engineering Graduate and Professional Programs

Courses Taught

• GAMEDSGN 590: Advanced Topics in Game Design, Development & Innovation

Publications

• Klein D, Spjut J, Boudaoud B, Kim J. On Smoothly Varying Frame Timing in First-Person Gaming. In: Proceedings - SIGGRAPH 2024 Talks. 2024.
• Madhusudan A, Spjut J, Boudaoud B, Kim J, Watson B. Studying Esports Competition: Piloting Methodology for User Studies during Tournaments. In: Proceedings - SIGGRAPH 2024 Talks. 2024.
• Yuen D, Spjut J. Experimenting with Artificial Intelligence: Programming Pathfinding Algorithms in C++ with Unreal Engine 5. In: Proceedings - SIGGRAPH 2024 Labs. 2024.
• Tokey SS, Chen Z, Mettler C, Tang D, Boudaoud B, Kim J, et al. The Effects of Network Latency on the Peeker's Advantage in First-person Shooter Games. In: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. 2024.
• Watson B, Spjut J, Kim J, Lee B, Yoo M, Shirley P, et al. Department: Applications Is Less More Rendering for Esports. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. 2024 Mar 1;44(2):110–6.
• Klein D, Spjut J, Boudaoud B, Kim J. Variable Frame Timing Affects Perception of Smoothness in First-Person Gaming. In: IEEE Conference on Computatonal Intelligence and Games, CIG. 2024.
• Boudaoud B, Spjut J, Kim J. Mouse Sensitivity in First-Person Targeting Tasks. IEEE Transactions on Games. 2023 Dec 1;15(4):493–506.
• Spjut J, Boudaoud B, Kim J. Constant Field of View Display Size Effects on First-Person Aiming Time. In: Frontiers in Optics: Proceedings Frontiers in Optics + Laser Science 2023, FiO, LS 2023. 2023.
• Kim J, Spjut J, Boudaoud B, Watson B, Whitted T. Rethinking Display Requirements for Esports and High Interactivity Applications. In: Digest of Technical Papers - SID International Symposium. 2023. p. 251–4.
• Kim J, Madhusudan A, Watson B, Boudaoud B, Tarrazo R, Spjut J. Display Size and Targeting Performance: Small Hurts, Large May Help. In: Proceedings - SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 Conference Papers. 2022.
• Boudaoud B, Spjut J, Kim J, Madhusudan A, Watson B. Esports and expertise. Interactions. 2022 Nov 3;29(6):54–9.
• Boudaoud B, Spjut J, Knowles P, Madhusudan A, Kim J. FirstPersonScience: An Open Source Tool for Studying FPS Esports Aiming. In: Proceedings - SIGGRAPH 2022 Talks. 2022.
• Kriglstein S, Martin-Niedecken AL, Spjut J, Damen NB, Türkay S, Drachen A. Esports meets human-computer interaction. Interactions. 2022 May 1;29(3):43–7.
• Boudaoud B, Spjut J, Kim J. Mouse Sensitivity in First-person Targeting Tasks. In: IEEE Conference on Computatonal Intelligence and Games, CIG. 2022. p. 183–90.
• Watson BA, Spjut J, Mcgee C, Issa A, Mackey W. Esports as a Driving Problem in Computer Graphics. In: Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference, SIGGRAPH 2021 Panels. 2021.
• Boudaoud B, Knowles P, Kim J, Spjut J. Gaming at Warp Speed: Improving Aiming with Late Warp. In: Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Emerging Technologies, SIGGRAPH 2021. 2021.
• Watson B, Spjut J, Kim J, Listman J, Kim S, Wimmer R, et al. Esports and High Performance HCI. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. 2021.
• Prashnani E, Gallo O, Kim J, Spjut J, Sen P, Frosio I. Noise-Aware Video Saliency Prediction. In: 32nd British Machine Vision Conference, BMVC 2021. 2021.
• Kim J, Knowles P, Spjut J, Boudaoud B, Mcguire M. Post-Render Warp with Late Input Sampling Improves Aiming Under High Latency Conditions. Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. 2020 Aug 26;3(2).
• Spjut J, Boudaoud B, Kim J, Greer T, Albert R, Stengel M, et al. Toward Standardized Classification of Foveated Displays. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics. 2020 May;26(5):2126–34.
• Spjut J, Boudaoud B, Binaee K, Kim J, Majercik A, McGuire M, et al. Latency of 30 ms benefits first person targeting tasks more than refresh rate above 60 Hz. In: SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 Technical Briefs, SA 2019. 2019. p. 110–3.
• Larson C, Spjut J, Knepper R, Shepherd R. A Deformable Interface for Human Touch Recognition Using Stretchable Carbon Nanotube Dielectric Elastomer Sensors and Deep Neural Networks. Soft robotics. 2019 Oct;6(5):611–20.
• Spjut J, Boudaoud B. Foveated displays: Toward classification of the emerging field. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Talks, SIGGRAPH 2019. 2019.
• Kim J, Stengel M, Wu JY, Boudaoud B, Spjut J, Akşit K, et al. Matching prescription & visual acuity: Towards AR for humans. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Emerging Technologies, SIGGRAPH 2019. 2019.
• Kim J, Jeong Y, Stengel M, Akşit K, Albert R, Boudaoud B, et al. Foveated AR: Dynamically-foveated augmented reality display. ACM Transactions on Graphics. 2019 Jul 1;38(4).
• Jalal M, Spjut J, Boudaoud B, Betke M. SIDOD: A synthetic image dataset for 3D object pose recognition with distractors. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops. 2019. p. 475–7.
• Barreiros J, Claure H, Peele B, Shapira O, Spjut J, Luebke D, et al. Fluidic Elastomer Actuators for Haptic Interactions in Virtual Reality. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. 2019 Apr 1;4(2):277–84.
• Christensen J, Bae J, Watson B, Talamadupula K, Spjut J, Joines S. UIBK: User interactions for building knowledge. In: International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Proceedings IUI. 2019. p. 131–2.
• Marrs A, Spjut J, Gruen H, Sathe R, McGuire M. Improving temporal antialiasing with adaptive ray tracing. In: Ray Tracing Gems: High-Quality and Real-Time Rendering with DXR and Other APIs. 2019. p. 353–70.
• Andersson P, Nilsson J, Salvi M, Spjut J, Akenine-Möller T. Temporally dense ray tracing. In: High-Performance Graphics - ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium Proceedings, HPG. 2019. p. 33–8.
• Rathinavel K, Spjut J, Chakravarthula P, Boudaoud B, Akşit K, Whitted T, et al. Steerable application-adaptive near eye displays. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Emerging Technologies, SIGGRAPH 2018. 2018.
• Marrs A, Spjut J, Gruen H, Sathe R, McGuire M. Adaptive temporal antialiasing. In: High-Performance Graphics - ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium Proceedings, HPG. 2018.
• Murray BCM, Peele BN, Xu P, Spjut J, Shapira O, Luebke D, et al. A variable shape and variable stiffness controller for haptic virtual interactions. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics, RoboSoft 2018. 2018. p. 264–9.
• Shkurko K, Grant T, Brunvand E, Kopta D, Spjut J, Vasiou E, et al. SimTRaX: Simulation infrastructure for exploring thousands of cores. In: Proceedings of the ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, GLSVLSI. 2018. p. 503–6.
• Aksit K, Lopes W, Kim J, Spjut J, Patney A, Shirley P, et al. Varifocal virtuality: A novel optical layout for near-eye display. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Emerging Technologies, SIGGRAPH 2017. 2017.
• Shepherd R, Peele B, MacMurray B, Barreiros J, Shapira O, Spjut J, et al. Stretchable transducers for kinesthetic interactions in virtual. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Emerging Technologies, SIGGRAPH 2017. 2017.
• Greer T, Spjut J, Luebke D, Whitted T. Hybrid Modulation for Near Zero Display Latency. In: Digest of Technical Papers - SID International Symposium. 2016. p. 76–8.
• Spjut J. Build your own game controller. In: SIGGRAPH 2015: Studio, SIGGRAPH 2015. 2015.
• Kopta D, Shkurko K, Spjut J, Brunvand E, Davis A. Memory considerations for low energy ray tracing. Computer Graphics Forum. 2015 Feb 1;34(1):47–59.
• Kopta D, Shkurko K, Spjut J, Brunvand E, Davis A. An energy and bandwidth efficient ray tracing architecture. In: Proceedings - High-Performance Graphics 2013, HPG 2013. 2013. p. 121–8.
• Kopta D, Ize T, Spjut J, Brunvand E, Davis A, Kensler A. Fast, effective BVH updates for animated scenes. In: Proceedings - I3D 2012: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games. 2012. p. 197–204.
• Kopta D, Spjut J, Brunvand E, Davis A. Efficient MIMD architectures for high-performance ray tracing. In: Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Computer Design: VLSI in Computers and Processors. 2010. p. 9–16.
• Pugsley SH, Spjut JB, Nellans DW, Balasubramonian R. SWEL: Hardware cache coherence protocols to map shared data onto shared caches. In: Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques - Conference Proceedings, PACT. 2010. p. 465–75.
• Spjut J, Kensler A, Kopta D, Brunvand E. TRaX: A multicore hardware architecture for real-time ray tracing. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems. 2009 Dec 1;28(12):1802–15.
• Spjut JB, Kensler AE, Brunvand EL. Hardware-accelerated gradient noise for graphics. In: Proceedings of the ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, GLSVLSI. 2009. p. 457–62.
• Kopta D, Spjut J, Brunvand E, Parker S. Comparing incoherent ray performance of TRaX vs. Manta. In: RT’08 - IEEE/EG Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing 2008, Proceedings. 2008. p. 183.
• Spjut J, Boulos S, Kopta D, Brunvand E, Kellis S. TRaX: A multi-threaded architecture for real-time ray tracing. In: 2008 Symposium on Application Specific Processors, SASP 2008. 2008. p. 108–14.