CryEngine 3 glimpse

At the recent the Games Developers Conference there was sneak preview of the CryEngine 3, largely considered the most advanced, graphics-wise at least, game engine today.

As the specs state; CryENGINE® 3 is the first Xbox 360™, PlayStation® 3, MMO, DX9 and DX10 all-in-one game development solution that is next-gen ready, with scalable computation and graphics technologies. With CryENGINE® 3 you can start the development of your next generation games today. CryENGINE® 3 is the only solution that provides multi-award winning graphics, physics and AI out of the box.

The complete game engine suite includes the famous CryENGINE® 3 Sandbox™ editor, a production-proven, 3rd generation tool suite designed and built by AAA developers. CryENGINE® 3 delivers everything you need to create your AAA games.

See the Crytek page for full info and updates, the vid above should also give you a glimpse of the capabilities of the new version of the engine. Looks very impressive indeed!

OnLive, a cloud-based future for gaming?

OnLive, a tech company that has been in self-described "stealth mode" development for seven years, has unveiled new technology that allows even the most complex PC games to be played on a television set or any PC.

The ambitious venture, which hopes to revolutionize the gaming world by removing the need to continually upgrade PC hardware or buy new gaming consoles every generation, makes use of cloud computing, doing all of the game's video and audio processing on remote servers, then streaming the resultant images and sound back to the user quickly enough to play games in real time.

What's most important though, says OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman and COO Mike McGarvey, is that the system works with any standard PC game, and does not require developers to code for a proprietary system. Other attempts have fallen short in that area, Perlman told Gamasutra in a demonstration preceding the announcement.

OnLive's service, which is planned to combine a relatively low monthly subscription fee with other per-game business models not yet fully determined, requires only a one-megabyte download to a computer, or a small plastic dongle (called a "micro-console") to connect to a TV; no GPU is required. Once subscribed, users will be able to run any of the service's games, regardless of system requirements.

A number of major publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Take-Two, Eidos, and Atari have already signed on. Also, the company has announced a partnership with Epic Games that will see the Unreal Engine 3 easily adapt to OnLive's APIs.

"Not only have we solved the problem of compressing the video games, we've solved the latency problem," Perlman said to Gamasutra. "We knew, in order to make this thing work, we'd have to figure out a way to get video to run compressed over consumer connections with effectively no latency. Our video compression technology has one millisecond in latency, basically no latency at all. All the latency is just for the transport, and we've also addressed that."

While it is of course impossible to completely eliminate the possibility of latency over a network, OnLive has actually gone to such lengths as to work directly with cable and internet providers to identify and repair inefficiencies in their systems that resulted in dropped packets or other flaws. Eventually, the company hopes to provide even faster service by streaming directly through cable to users' homes, much like paid television currently is. When OnLive launches this winter, the system will feature various community features, as well as the ability to spectate other players' games in real time, even if the game does not natively contain an observer mode, since all gameplay is delivered a video stream, that feature is integrated directly into OnLive itself.

http://www.onlive.com/

3D web on the Mozilla browser?

Wish you could play Crysis in your Web browser? Two influential organizations are banding together to try to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the Web, a move that eventually could improve online games and other Web applications.

Mozilla, the group behind the Firefox browser, and Khronos, the consortium that oversees the widely used OpenGL graphics interface technology, are trying to jointly create a standard for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web. In response to a Mozilla proposal, Khronos established an Accelerated 3D on Web working group to create a royalty-free specification. The goal is to produce a first public version within 12 months, Khronos said in an announcement at the recent Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco.

Underpinning the proposal is a trend toward significant speed improvements in JavaScript, the programming language used to write many Web-based applications. The proposal involves a mechanism to let JavaScript tap into the OpenGL standard to produce the accelerated graphics.

"Accelerated 3D graphics with the super-fast next-generation JavaScript engines from nearly every Web browser vendor means that we're going to be able to start to see more and more advanced applications written using open Web technologies," said Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard in a recent blog post. "3D is a huge part of that story and we're happy to bring our proposal to the table." Personally very interested to see where this development could lead...

IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications journal special issue on Serious Games

The latest issue of the top-flight in its area IEEE Computer Graphics And Applications journal is dedicated to serious games and makes for a very good read if you're doing research in this particular field. The cutting edge work presented in this special issue is very inspirational and well worth exploring.

Articles include Making Them Remember-Emotional Virtual Characters with Memory by Zerrin Kasap, Maher Ben Moussa, Parag Chaudhuri, and Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, The Booze Cruise: Impaired Driving in Virtual Spaces by James R. Parker, Nathan Sorenson, Nooshin Esmaeili, Ronan Sicre, Phillipa Gil, Vishal Kochlar, Lori Shyba, and John Heerema and A VR Playground for Learning Abstract Mathematics Concepts by Maria Roussou. Visit the journal site at http://www.computer.org/portal/site/cga/index.jsp

IEEE VS Games 2009 conference presentations now online

Last week I attended (and presented) at the First International IEEE Conference in Serious Games and Virtual Worlds, hosted by the world's premier Serious Games Institute in the UK at Coventry. The event was extremely interesting and diverse in research content, bringing together researchers from a range of disciplines to formulate a new cross-disciplinary community in the emerging field of serious games and virtual worlds. You can now watch edited video versions (no questions or introductions) of all talks at the conference including the keynote ones (by professors Alan Chalmers and Steve Benford) at http://dp-x.com/datpresenter/dpx.php?dpxuser=SGI.

The next, 2nd, IEEE VS Games conference will take place next year between the 24th and the 26th of March 2010 in Braga, Portugal. This announcement was made at the VS-Games '09 Conference.

Google Street View launched

Google has launched its controversial Street View mapping service in the UK, with web and mobile phone users able to see 360-degree views of 25 cities from Southampton to Aberdeen. The company has spent almost a year collecting images, with a fleet of specially modified cars crawling along 22,369 miles of British roads and the resultant images provide a snapshot of a bygone era before the recession hit the British high street.

Many of the pictures were taken last summer - although the unseasonally wet weather played havoc with Google's camera cars - and show stores that have since gone bust, including Woolworths. Even household goods retailer The Pier is still open for business on London's Tottenham Court Road in the world of Street View as is Zavvi just down the road. There have been issues with complaints about privacy (for specific cases as well since the system went online yesterday) but at the same time it's fascinating to finally see this available.

Click here to see City University where I am doing my PhD in Street View.

ELSIN 2009 conference paper accepted

A full paper I've co-authored with colleagues from Bournemouth University has been accepted for publication at this year's 14th annual ELSIN conference in Bulle-en-Gruyere, Switzerland. The European Learning Styles Information Network (ELSIN) is an association of academics, researchers, trainers and practitioners in the fields of education, psychology, business, computer science, information systems, management and other related fields who are interested in the theory and application of learning and cognitive styles and strategies of learning and thinking. The paper is tiled "Risky Business: A new approach to teaching risk assessments in sports".

ELSIN organises an annual three-day conference in June. The programme consists of invited keynote lectures, paper sessions, workshops, symposia, and informal social activities and will this year take place between the 17th and the 19th of June.

http://www.elsin2009.com/

Cityscape 1.6 video demonstration

I've posted on the automatic urban modelling tool Cityscape in the past but I thought I'd post a video demonstration of that too, now that the application has reached version 1.6. CityScape was created to reduce the tedious, labor intensive process of building and modifying urban environments, empowering the interactive world builders of tomorrow.

Using rapid urban modeling and active adjustment features, CityScape is able to achieve substantial improvements in workflow efficiency over traditional object modeling tools and scene editors. Worlds created by CityScape are compatible with a variety of file formats and optimized for real-time rendering engines.

For more information, a demo or for purchasing the app visit http://pixelactive3d.com/Products/CityScape/

The making of Mirror's Edge

I've posted previously on the very impressive (particularly on the urban modelling front) Mirror's Edge game. I've just come across an online article where Johannes Söderqvist, Art Director of the Mirror’s Edge game, takes the people from the CGSociety website through thoughts on the production of the game. The production team wanted to remove the focus on vehicles and guns found on modern platform games and develop an extension of what people could do physically, especially within a slightly futuristic urban setting.

If you're interested in post-mortem, making-of articles about games this one is definitely worth reading, they don't go through the urban modelling part as much as I'd like! Still, this is an interesting read on a game that tried to push the envelope. You can find the article at http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4943

Street Fighter 4, the best non-photorealistic game so far?

It's been out for a couple of months now but I've only recently had the time to spend some time playing with Capcom's Street Fighter 4 and, yes, IMO it is the best and most complete non-photorealistic rendering game out there so far, not just in terms of graphics performance but, and perhaps more importantly, visual style and how that blends in and actually improves the game itself.

While Street Fighter IV features models and backgrounds rendered in 3D, the gameplay remains on a traditional 2D plane. Producer Yoshinori Ono has stated that he wanted to keep the game closer to Street Fighter II. A new system called "Focus Attacks" ("Saving Attack" for the Japanese version) has been introduced, as well as Ultra moves. The traditional six-button control scheme returns, with new features and special moves integrated into the input system, mixing classic gameplay with additional innovations.

All the characters and environments in Street Fighter IV are rendered as 3D models with polygons, similar to the Street Fighter EX sub-series Capcom produced with Arika. However, there are a couple of key differences. Art director and character designer Daigo Ikeno, who previously worked on Street Fighter III 3rd Strike added a stylized effect to give them a hand-drawn look with visual effects accented in calligraphic strokes, ink smudges and ink sprays during the fights.

Using online games to study human behaviour

Can researchers study the populations of online video games, like Everquest 2, just as they study traditional communities like Miami, Pittsburgh or Minneapolis? A research study by a University of Minnesota computer scientist and colleagues from across the country shows that online, interactive gaming communities are now so massive that they mirror traditional communities. These findings are creating a new evolution of social science research where researchers are able to study human behavior using the game.

The research team analyzed three years of data (over 60 terabytes) from the complete server logs and click-streams of Sony's popular PC game EverQuest 2. The data tracked every action performed in one of the world's most popular massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Everquest 2 has more than 300,000 players who average 26 hours per week playing the game. Because of the intense level of involvement and multi-player environment of the game, the researchers were able to study human behavioral dynamics using the game as a proxy.

The researchers used the virtual world to model the social and behavioral dynamics of individuals, groups, and networks within large communities. Their study presented evidence that the social sciences are at the threshold of a fundamental shift not only in our understanding of the social and behavioral sciences, but also the ways in which we study them.

This interdisciplinary research project was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army with cooperation from Sony. Multiplayer online games and virtual worlds have become increasingly popular and have communities comprising millions. They allow social scientists to study, theorize and model the social and behavioral dynamics of individuals, groups, and networks within large communities. The researchers described how this research offers new insights as well as challenges and opportunities for advancing social, behavioral, and computational science.

Eutechnyx recognised as a game development placement company

For students interested in game dev. placements, some interesting news for you. UK developer Eutechnyx has been recognised at the recent National Council for Work Experience awards event. The studio, which specialises in driving games, was singled out in the NCWE Work Experience Awards 2008/2009 ceremony as 'highly commendable' for its efforts with its Level Up student placement program.

“Level Up has been a huge success for Eutechnyx and we are very honoured to have received this commendation,” said Arwen Duddington, Level Up team leader. Level Up invites students to spend a year working on a project under the guidance of a number of developers who provide mentoring and feedback. The program also aims to deliver commercial releases of the games made within its remit.

“Although the courses on offer at the universities can be excellent, there are some skills that can only be learnt in the workplace,” claimed Duddington, “Level Up allows us to work with the students and shape their work ethics and approach to real world development, which, when coupled with their academic studies, produces fantastic results.”

http://www.eutechnyx.com/

Virtual Reality technology to let you see, hear, smell, taste and touch

The first virtual reality headset that can stimulate all five senses will be unveiled at a major science event in London on March 4th. What was it really like to live in Ancient Egypt? What did the streets there actually look, sound and smell like? For decades, Virtual Reality has held out the hope that, one day, we might be able visit all kinds of places and periods as ‘virtual’ tourists. To date, though, Virtual Reality devices have not been able to stimulate simultaneously all five senses with a high degree of realism.

With funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), scientists from the Universities of York and Warwick believe they have been able to pinpoint the necessary expertise to make this possible, in a project called ‘Towards Real Virtuality’. ‘Real Virtuality’ is a term coined by the project team to highlight their aim of providing a ‘real’ experience in which all senses are stimulated in such a way that the user has a fully immersive perceptual experience, during which s/he cannot tell whether or not it is real.

Teams at York and Warwick now aim to link up with experts at the Universities of Bangor, Bradford and Brighton to develop the ‘Virtual Cocoon’ - a new Real Virtuality device that can stimulate all five senses much more realistically than any other current or prospective device. For the user, the ‘Virtual Cocoon’ will consist of a headset incorporating specially developed electronics and computing capabilities. It could help unlock the full potential benefits of Real Virtuality in fields such as education, business and environmental protection. A mock-up of the Virtual Cocoon will be on display at ‘Pioneers 09’, an EPSRC showcase event to be held at London’s Olympia Conference Centre on Wednesday 4th March.

HCI International 2009 poster accepted

I have just received confirmation that a poster publication I have co-authored with colleagues from Bournemouth University has been accepted for the upcoming 13th HCI International 2009 conference.

The publication is titled "Developing a Virtual Reality Stroke Rehabilitation Prototype" and I will be presenting that alongside the full paper I also have accepted at the same conference (see here). The conference takes place between the 19th and 24th July 2009 at San Diego, California, USA and proceedings will be published as part of the Lecture Notes In Computer Science series by Springer and are ISI indexed.

http://www.hcii2009.org/

XNA game design camp

Microsoft and Channel 4 have partnered with Pixel Lab to host a two-day game design challenge at the University of Derby. Taking place from March 20th, the X48 event will bring together 80 students for what is being branded as 'the first XNA GameCamp'.

Attendees will use the facilities at the University and are charged with creating prototypes projects using XNA Game Studio 3.0 within the two-day time limit. The event is designed to encourage the next-generation of game development professionals and foster innovation. At the weekend's closing ceremony, finished prototypes will be presented to a Microsoft-led panel of judges.

Channel 4's commissioning editor for education Alice Taylor said: "We're fully behind encouraging collaboration and competition between young and emerging British indie gaming talent, and fully approve of the freewheeling creative environment that X48 is going to produce. We'll be setting the theme of the challenge, and keeping an eye out for both talent and games that we can continue to support or develop post-event."

"X48 is a great opportunity to bring like-minded students together and inspire them to create games using XNA," added at Microsoft UK's academic lead, Andrew Sithers. "Partnering with Channel 4 and the University of Derby brings together technology, creativity and talent at an event that will pit the UK's best student game developers against the clock."

http://www.x48gamecamp.com/

Google Earth discovers Atlantis?!

On a very amusing piece of news which has developed the last few days (and even got some coverage in The Sun!) the lost city of Atlantis is still lost, despite hopes that Google Earth had located the fabled city on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean!

Observers noted what seemed to be a grid of streets and the outlines of a big city on the sea floor about 960km (600 miles) off the African coast. Experts had said this was one of the possible sites of the city described by Plato, the Greek philosopher.

But Google has just revealed that the lines represented sonar data collected from boats. "It's true that many amazing discoveries have been made in Google Earth including a pristine forest in Mozambique that is home to previously unknown species and the remains of an Ancient Roman villa," a Google statement said. "In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artefact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor," it was added.

"The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world's oceans." It is in my opinion incredibly intriguing, amusing yet fascinating that we've now reached a digitization point in time where technology like Google Earth can be associated with the discovery of mythical Atlantis. You can find the original The Sun article below for a bit of light entertainment!

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2255989.ece

Virtual 3D model of Philadelphia

An interesting virtual city project I've come across recently; Virtual Philadelphia is a 3D online virtual city mirrored off the Center City of Philadelphia, PA, full of historical landscapes and buildings, hundreds of years of culture and one of the most beloved and popular US cities.

GeoSim compiles gigabytes of aerial photos, street images, laser scans and geodetic measurements of Philadelphia to build an accurate 3D city model, capable of providing a genuine life simulation of the physical streets, buildings and urban landscape with the "look and feel" of a real city.

Through a broadband Internet connection, Virtual Philadelphia conveys to anaudience of local residents, national and international tourists and visitors the true experience of being there, combined with a variety of location-related content and useful applications, such as Local Search, Virtual Tours, City Planning, E-Shopping and Human Interaction.

As a user you have the option to walk, hover, jump to and simply roam through true-to-life Virtual Philadelphia, or to meet other users, to click on any building, bus stop or shop to find out more information about it or even to go inside.

http://www.geosimphilly.com/

SIGGRAPH embracing games?

The SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival will this year for the first time include a segment on real-time rendering projects, in which the top selections will be played and demonstrated live on various platforms. A jury of industry professionals and experts will judge the entries on creativity, innovation, performance, and the ability to render in real time in front of the live audience.

Selected contributors will have an opportunity to show their projects for the Computer Animation Festival Evening Theater audience, and to showcase their work in The Sandbox, where attendees get a hands-on gaming experience. "The addition of live, real-time rendering work is going to make this one of the most dynamic and innovative festivals in SIGGRAPH history," says Ronen Barzel, SIGGRAPH 2009 conference chair.

"The gaming industry has been a substantial innovator in real-time graphics, and now the best gaming work can be showcased at SIGGRAPH alongside the latest developments in research, science, art, and technology from around the globe."

Real-time rendering will focus on mathematical or other industrial simulations, research projects, real-time artist explorations, new uses of pioneering technology and scientific visualizations. SIGGRAPH 2009 will be held in New Orleans from August 3-7 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

http://www.siggraph.org/s2009/

Microsoft to challenge Wii?

Microsoft is looking to acquire an Israeli imaging company in a bid to 'anxiously outdo the Wii' according to new reports on the web. According to a report in the Israel press, the format-holder is looking to buying 3DV Systems and its camera-based motion-sensing technology and integrate it into its games business. Reportedly, Microsoft will pay $35m for the firm, whose ZCams tech is in effect like Sony's EyeToy but with more precise imaging and motion sensing due to their 3D cameras.

Venturebeat's Dean Takahashi has also reported on the acquisition, recapping his own experiences with the tech during a previous demo: "When I did a demo of the technology, I was able to control a game just by waving my arms around. I could fly a plane by pretending to hold a joystick and also box against a virtual fighter by throwing punches toward the camera. The motion detection was accurate, much more so than the Wii, which uses relatively cheap but primitive accelerometers and infrared technology for motion detection."

3DV has been spending recent years trying to commercialise the 3D camera technology, saying it could release the camera at a sub $100 price (a perfect add-on peripheral for the 360?). However, Microsoft has already said that it 'doesn't comment on rumour and speculation' but time will show whether this one stands up or not.

Microsoft Research India working on new ways of architectural digital tours

The India Digital Heritage Project is a huge undertaking by Microsoft Research India that tries to collect, store, and share data on architectural sites and stimulate research in visualization, computer vision, graphics and related fields.

Various academic and industry research organizations formed a Program Advisory & Monitoring Committee to monitor the project. MSR India's role is to provide technologies such as Photosynth and HD View (the latter at its beta) to help showcase various Indian heritage sites in both 2D and 3D. At the moment, the project encompasses five sites with either Photosynth or HD View (beta) examples (example in the vid below).

Users can choose to follow a "guided-tour" where a narrator explains the historical and cultural importance of what is being viewed. As you can see, the potential of this project is really phenomenal. Slideshows of pictures and videos really aren't enough for digital tours of landmarks but putting together technologies like Photosynth and HD View (beta) can seriously improve the experience. The engineers, researchers, and designers that had to work to put this together have only recently finished a pilot prototype for the Sri Andal Temple in Srivilliputtur.

HD View, developed by Microsoft Research's Interactive Visual Media group, is a viewer meant for large images (think billions of pixels) that have been stitched together using smaller images. Photosynth, on the other hand, is a technology that analyzes and pieces together multiple images of an area or object from multiple angles to create virtual worlds called a "synth." The latter has actually undergone an update recently, with "a lot more features and improvements in the works."