Minecraft, the Ordnance Survey and an in-game map of Britain

This has made the news recently and is worth checking out as it is easily one of the best "serious" uses of the Minecraft game phenomenon.

Ordnance Survey has used their data to recreate, in-game, over 220,000 square kilometres of mainland Great Britain and also surrounding islands, all done by an intern in the company. This was by using more than 22 billion blocks to put this all together.

 

 

You can read more about the process here, and, more importantly, also download this and use it (you will need to have Minecraft installed).

Murasaki Baby PS Vita game

It's always great to see a game with non-photorealistic graphics, particularly if it also flies in the face on what is conventional gaming too. Murasaki Baby by Italian studio Ovosonico. Part of Sony's recent Gamescom presentation the game is a great example of hand drawn art combined with a novel gameplay mechanic.
 

 

The game is to come out on Sony's PS Vita and is well worth checking out in the video above.

Toast Time game from Force of Habit

It's great to see a former BU student doing well; this is Ashley Gwinnell who is involved with the Bristol-based Force of Habit start-up. They have recently released a title for Android phones called Toast Time.

The game can be purchased here. Versions for other platforms are also in the works.

VS Games 2014 location and website announced

The first web page of the VS Games 2014 website is now up and running. As announced during VS Games 2013 in Bournemouth UK, the next outing of the conference will take place in Valetta, Malta between the 9th and the 12th of September 2014.

More information can be found here, with the CFP set for November.

Awards at VS Games 2013

VS Games 2013 has drawn to a close; 3 awards were handed out during the conference to the best papers for 3 different categories. These were the following;

 

1) Best Full Paper Award; Barata, G., Gama, S., Jorge, J. and Gonçalves, D. "Engaging Engineering Students with Gamification"
2) Best Short Paper Award; Kremer, D., Schlieder, C., Feulner, B. and Ohl, U. "Spatial Choices in an Educational Geogame"
3) Best IEEE Member Award; Paraskevopoulos, I. and Tsekleves, E. "Use of Gaming Sensors and Customised ExerGames for Parkinson’s Disease Rehabilitation: A proposed Virtual Reality Framework"

 

 

All of the prizes for these awards were kindly donated by Springer.

I Am Street Fighter documentary made available by Capcom

Capcom themselves have uploaded an official documentary on the Street Fighter series (focusing on the dedicated fandom for the iconic fighting games). Well worth watching if you're interested in both the game but also its evolution from the very first title of the series to the (still-very-popular) cel-shaded modern version.

 

 

 The video is over 70 minutes long.

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.

 

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.

VS Games 2013 programme now available

The VS Games 2013 full programme (including the workshop mentioned in a post earlier this month) is now available for all of its three days and can be found here. A .pdf version of this can also be downloaded from here.

 

 

While the submission call is closed and has been for a while, the conference is still open for participation and attendees can still register in time for the event in September.

July version of UDK out

UDK's latest build is also released this month (July). After a reasonably lengthy wait (the last build was from February) the next free version of Epic Games' Unreal engine is now available.

 

Looking at the update notes here this appears to be more about bug fixing rather than adding new features which of course prompts the question on a UDK based on Unreal 4 possibly made available soon (or whether there will really be many more UDK versions/updates based on Unreal 3?).

 

 

In any case it is worth installing this for all the Unreal aficionados, it can be found here.

Unity 4.2 now out

Version 4.2 of Unity is now released. All of the additions and updates can be found here on the official Unity website (I won't focus on these in this blog post) however what is really worth highlighting is that the free version of Unity now also supports porting to Windows Phone 8, Windows Store apps and BlackBerry 10.

 

This is in addition to existing mobile platforms (like iOS and Android) and this move will definitely be very welcome by the mobile development community.

Extended version of Mobile HCI paper chosen for Journal of Mobile HCI special issue

An extended version of the Mobile HCI workshop paper (see recent post below) I am one of the co-authors for has now been invited for submission in a special issue of  the Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction. This special issue will contain the best papers from this year’s Mobile HCI 2013 workshops. 
 

 

More information about this journal can be found here.

VS Games workshop

VS Games 2013 will have a co-located workshop, titled SLACTIONS workshop on Technology Challenges of Virtual Worlds in Education & Training towards widespread adoption. The workshop is established in cooperation with the Slactions 2013 conference on virtual worlds.

 

 

Selected papers submitted to this workshop will be invited to present at Slactions 2013 in November. Furthermore, the best papers from the workshop will be invited to submit extended versions to the upcoming January 2015 special issue of the Journal of Educational Technology and Society (impact factor 2011: 1.011), “Overcoming the technological hurdles facing virtual worlds in education: the road to widespread deployment.”

 

More information about the workshop can be found here.

Mobile HCI workshop paper accepted

A paper I am the co-author on has recently been accepted to the upcoming Mobile HCI workshop, Designing Mobile Augmented Reality. The paper is titled "Proposing a design framework for smartphone AR browsers used in unfamiliar urban tourism destinations". Mobile HCI, this year, will be taking place in Munich, Germany and this will be during the 27th and 30th of August.

 

 

 For more information about the conference (and the aforementioned workshop) please visit here.

CGI 2013 short paper accepted and published

At the recent CGI 2013 conference I was the co-author of a short paper titled "Automatic Terrain Texturing with Dynamic Patch Transitions" which was presented by myself during the conference. The conference, which is now a long-standing academic event in the area of computer graphics, took place in Hannover, Germany this year between the 11th and the 14th of June.

 

For more information about CGI 2013 see here.

Edge magazine article on BU and Games courses online

Similarly to last year Edge magazine has an article on the Bournemouth University Games courses; I was interviewed for this. This article originally appeared in their Get Into Games special issue (issue 255, July 2013) and is now also available online.

The article can be found in full here.

Third keynote for VS Games 2013

 

The third keynote speaker for the VS Games 2013 conference is Dr Christopher Peters,  Associate Professor of HCI and Computer Graphics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. The title of the talk is the following; "Computational Modelling of Artificial Behaviour: A Perceptual Approach".

Christopher Peters is an Associate Professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in the High Performance Computing and Visualization Department, where he is a member of the VIC (Visualisation-Interaction-Collaboration) Studio. His research interests include the investigation of interrelationships between computational visual attention, affect, memory, theory of mind and gaze control models for real-time animation, perception of, and multimodal interaction with humanoid characters, groups and crowds. He has published over 75 papers on related themes and is a co-founder of the AFFINE (Affective Interaction in Natural Environments) events that have taken place at various venues, including ACM ICMI and ACM Multimedia.

 

For abstract info of the talk please visit here.