Saturday 31 August 2013

Emotiv Insight, a new EEG device

I have had a couple of EPOC EEG devices from Emotiv for a while now and it is interesting to see they have a new proposed device on Kickstarter called Insight.

Insight (the device on the right, EPOC is on the left) has less sensors than its predecessor (5 EEG sensors and 2 reference sensors) but does not (unlike EPOC) require saline solution for conductivity.


More information on what the device can do can be found on its Kickstarter site here.

What is worth noting is that with more than two weeks to go the campaign has already returned many times over the original goal, always a good sign of a piece of technology which has captured imaginations. 

Dysbiosis game

A while back (see blog post here) I posted news on a game called Dysbiosis which came out of the Wellcome Trust Gamify Your PhD competition (with Ashley Gwinnell, a graduate of Bournemouth University involved in its making).
 
 
The game has received further funding since and has been polished, it can be seen (trailer) here or played in a web browser here.

It is a great example indeed of a public engagement game for the fields the aforementioned funding body supports and, with some imagination, a strong showcase of what can be done via the use of gaming for other scientific areas too.

Project Anarchy from Havok

Keen to compete with other engines such as Unreal (particularly in its UDK guise) and Unity, Havok has offered a development toolset called Project Anarchy earlier this summer. With this (potentially game-changing?) move Havok offers a suite of tools which can be used to generate and deploy games on the iOS and Android  platforms and, according to their initial press release here, "without commercial restrictions on company size or revenue".
 
 
It is important to note that, similarly to UDK and Unity, Project Anarchy is free to download and can be found here. Well worth checking out if you are seeking an alternative to the engines mentioned above.
 

Saturday 24 August 2013

TIGA press release on A-level results

TIGA, the trade association body for game developers in the UK, recently put out a press release to coincide with this year's A-level results. I was also asked (in my capacity as an academic at Bournemouth University, where we are also members of TIGA) to provide a quote for this.
  
  
The press release can be found in full here.

VS Games 2013 social dinner venue announced

The scheduled VS Games 13 conference dinner will take place on Thursday the 12th of September at the West Beach restaurant in Bournemouth. The restaurant is located very close to the seafront and off the pier and is in a great location, i.e. very close the centre of the town yet only a few feet away from the beach. Hopefully the (very) unpredictable British weather will not let us down on this occasion!


More information about this can be found on the official conference website here.