Six million dollar man, Dr. Andrew Hogue, Assistant Professor and Program Director of Game Development and Entrepreneurship in the Faculty of Business and Information Technology at Ontario Tech University, has been awarded significant research funding to advance areas immersive technology including virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality environments and their effects on humans, in his early academic career. Creating more effective content for virtual reality games and simulations, and understanding how technology influences or constrains the user is the basis of his research platform, with applications in robotics, business, and health care. Dr. Hogue’s gaming research currently focuses on developing a tangible interactive media environment for rapid iteration and design and involves building immersive and interactive technology to enable game designers to rapidly test out new rules, animations, and sculptures using tangible real-world objects and sensors. In partnership with the Certified General Accountants of Ontario, his research includes the development of a pilot game using serious game technology to make business education more effective. Dr. Hogue is also collaborating on research to utilize sensing and game design technology to train firefighters to lift objects more effectively in order to reduce back injuries. The research examines whether firefighters’ cognitive decision-making skills can be influenced through a game-based training regime. Appointed to in July 2007, Dr. Hogue has been instrumental in developing its innovative Game Development and Entrepreneurship program. He received his Bachelor of Science in 2001, this Master of Science in 2003, and his Doctorate with a specialty in Robotics in 2008, all from the Department of Computer Science at York University, and served as adjunct faculty from 2009 to 2012. During his master’s program, he studied innovative methods of tracking human motion within CAVE-like virtual environments and helped to build one of Canada’s first six-sided, fully-enclosed, virtual reality caves. His doctoral dissertation involved work on AQUA, a collaborative research project that enabled the advancement of autonomous underwater robotic technology for exploration and monitoring of coral reefs. Dr. Hogue developed the vision-sensing algorithms, enabling the robot to simultaneously estimate its motion while extracting an accurate 3D model of the environment.     Ontario Tech University