UCF in the News

The Orlando Economic Partnership is claiming the city as the metacenter, or the "physical center of the metaverse." It doesn't seem like such a far-out idea, as Orlando was recently named the best big city to start a business by WalletHub. At UCF, Ben Noel is the executive director of the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. He leads the best and brightest in video game development. “The video game industry in Central Florida is one of the fastest-growing video game regions in the country,” Noel said.

An army of Knights are among the researchers charging their way into final frontier with innovative projects shaping the future of space travel. Perhaps it’s unsurprising due to the University of Central Florida’s history tied to the American space program. As need for more aerospace engineers rose, the “space university” opened its doors to education in 1968 — the same year the Apollo 8 mission took humans into the moon’s orbit.

A simple smile is a powerful thing. “Smiling is soothing, it’s healthy,” said Will Lee, UCF Football’s Director of Player Development. So when a group of UCF football players were asked to help make local kids smile, they jumped at the opportunity. “I didn’t have to beg for these guys to come here they were like coach we are all in,” said Coach Lee. “Me and a bunch of my teammates are here to hopefully make some smiles for these kids and brighten their days,” UCF running back Isaiah Bowser said. But these kids aren’t just any kids. They are warriors. “Because they are fighting a war every day,” said Dr. Shveta Gupta, a pediatric hematology and oncology physician at Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children.

University of Central Florida researchers are part of a team who has found that there’s no one-size-fits all approach to digital reading and that adjusting font style and size can increase reading speed while maintaining comprehension. Think of it as prescription glasses for a digital world. The results were published recently in the journal ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). The study, led by researchers with the Readability Consortium that’s housed at UCF, found that changing font to one better suited to an individual resulted in a 35% increase in reading speed while maintaining comprehension. Researchers compared individuals’ reading speeds and comprehension levels when reading text in various fonts. The Readability Consortium is a collaboration among UCF, Adobe, Readability Matters and Google to research digital readability using individuated typography to improve reading speed and comprehension. The study also showed that people didn’t always know what their best fonts were, as personal preference for fonts did not necessarily predict reading speed, says study co-author Ben Sawyer, director of the Readability Consortium and an associate professor in UCF’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems.

Commercial developers Marc and Sharon Hagle pledged more than $5 million to the University of Central Florida to help fund an enhanced football campus ahead of the school’s entry into the Big 12 conference. The donation is the largest cash pledge ever made by an individual or couple to UCF athletics. The Winter Park couple said in a press release that their donation will help prepare the athletics department for success in the Big 12 when UCF becomes a member in July 2023.

University of Central Florida hospitality researchers co-authored an international tourism report that was presented to world leaders. Their work was laid out at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The report discusses solutions for sustainable coastal and marine tourism around the globe.

Guaranteed and dual admissions — under which students are accepted to both two- and four-year programs at the same time — are designed to smooth their paths. They usually include additional advising that many need to help them make the leap. This simple but little-noticed innovation is designed to fix a system that has stymied the ambitions of a staggering number of students — a problem that has only been getting worse. Amoni Hall just finished a two-year program at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, which shares not only a guaranteed transfer agreement called DirectConnect with the University of Central Florida, but also a campus downtown.

In July 2019, the asteroid 2019 OK came screaming out of the glare of the Sun where astronomers find it difficult to detect such small, faint objects, and passed within 45,000 miles of Earth while traveling at 5487 miles per hour. That's well inside the Moon's average orbit of around 238,000 miles. Despite the close call, 2019 OK didn't pose a threat to life on Earth, but asteroids like it one day could. That’s why scientists at the Arecibo radio astronomy observatory in Puerto Rico raced to make as many radar observations of the space rock as they could in the half hour or so it would remain in range of their antennas. They wanted to learn as much as possible about an asteroid that passed the Earth that closely and quickly. “It was a real challenge,” Luisa Fernanda Zambrano-Marin, a University of Central Florida planetary scientist who was at Arecibo in 2019, said in a statement. “No one saw it until it was practically passing by, so when we got the alert, we had very little time to act. Even so, we were able to capture a lot of valuable information.” That information is now published in a new paper in the Planetary Science Journal.

Florida colleges and universities are poised for a big year, thanks to two key factors: Gov. Ron DeSantis' Freedom First budget that includes $1.5 billion for state colleges and $3 billion for state universities; and the ongoing growth of corporate partnerships that provide a secondary revenue stream to meet local workforce needs. The University of Central Florida has its sights set on growing its financial impact. The college’s latest strategic plan — which covers 2022 to 2027 — includes goals to add hundreds of faculty members and grow its profile as a research university. To help fund those goals, the college will look at diversifying its revenue beyond tuition revenue and state appropriations — which often can be unpredictable — by increasing its endowment value from $201 million to $350 million and growing annual fundraising from $70 million to $100 million by 2027.