XNA-based game engine Torque X upgraded to version 2.0

GarageGames' XNA-based game engine, Torque X, has been upgraded to version 2.0. The update brings the engine up to the full XNA 2.0 specification, giving users full access to all of the new upgrades that have been part of the latest version of Microsoft’s managed framework released in late 2007 such as improved parity between Windows and Xbox 360 projects, support for the full range of Visual Studio 2005 versions, multiple render targets, faster rendering and the new smoother deployment process.

It also provides a full, stable release of the new 3D features of the engine – which have been present but in a ‘beta’ state since version 1.5 – including support for GarageGames’ proprietary model format DTS, used by its other engines, and the more common FBX, X and XSI model formats. Currently the only editor available for the application is an updated version of the old 2D drag-and-drop Torque X Builder, although the company has announced that it is currently developing a 3D world editor for the engine, and hopes to release it soon.

Those willing to get their hands dirty without the editor, though, can enjoy features like chunked LOD terrains with clip map texturing, rigid body physics and collision, post processing effects and a 3D particle system. "It's amazing to see how far XNA development has come in such a short time. When we partnered with Microsoft to develop Torque X in 2006, the game development community was still pretty skeptical of managed code", said Brett Seyler, GarageGames VP of business development. "Last year's Dream Build Play winners looked awesome and now with true, full-featured game engines to speed and ease development even further, I expect we'll see Torque X and XNA game development really thrive in 2008".

Grand Theft Auto IV, Liberty City model = New York model

For the latest, much anticipated, Grand Theft Auto IV title, Rockstar Games, its creators, decided to accurately capture the essence of New York, so that the city where the company is headquartered would also be the place they were depicting in their game. The aim was to make a detailed digital recreation of New York that hummed with life and whose environment had a sense of having been lived in (and perhaps not so painstakingly accurate like the Prototype title, also eagerly waited, discussed in previous posts).

The art team at Rockstar North in Scotland along with a full time research team in New York set about condensing and defining the essence of the city for the game - it would not be a block by block recreation of New York, but instead a spiritually faithful re-imagining that turned New York into the perfect digital environment for the gangster epic that was going to unfold in it - and this town would be called Liberty City. It has an unprecedented amount of visual detail for a video game world and teams with life. From the gleaming skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan all the way down to the divots on a sidewalk in Queens, the utmost care was taken to make sure no detail, large or small, slipped through the cracks.

The world of Liberty City was to not only look alive, but also feel alive. This was achieved both by visual cues such as the dirt and decay that make it feel so lived in, the effects of years of use and misuse, and also by putting into that environment its own weather systems, day and night time ambiences, a population who respond to both, along with all of the human scale modifications to the built environment - thousands of advertisements from billboards to fly posters, for hundreds of brands, a full media system including radio and a functioning internet that people can use to discover things to do in the world in their down time. For the beauty of the world to have any meaning, people would have to have fun when they visited. New York is the most fun city on the planet, so it was felt that Liberty City would have to be the most fun digital city ever created, so it is full of distractions for the visitor looking for a good time.

In order to create a city at once so visually detailed and full of life, it was necessary to undertake research on a scale never previously seen before. Along with multiple research trips by the art team from Rockstar North, and the expertise of the members from years of living in New York, Rockstar utilized a full-time research team to photograph and video every aspect of the city. Not only building fronts, fire hydrants, roads and sidewalks, but also lighting changes across day and night, vehicle and pedestrian patterns throughout the day, the racial and social make-up of different neighborhoods and boroughs, the sounds of specific foghorns in the harbor, all combined to make a completely integrated world that continuously seems alive and natural in a way that was not possible in previous games. Local experts were interviewed and consulted on every detail to make sure Liberty City feels real to the player.

All of this was necessary, not to merely recreate a view of New York but to capture its spirit and energy in a three-dimensional world that people can explore as the character they play in the game, Niko Bellic, an immigrant, as he navigates the land of opportunity for the first time. From the top of a penthouse to the inside of a Russian supper club, players will be immersed in the world of Liberty City in a way that they would never have thought possible, and it looks like the 3D urban model, plus all the surrounding details associated with it are the ones set to achieve this immersion...

It all looks very impressive and I am eagerly the release of the title, check the pics above where first you can see some NY scenery and then its 3D counterpart...

ACM Interactions magazine article, Pencils Before Pixels: A primer in hand-generated sketching

Recently reading up on expressive rendering and hand-drawn driven graphics and how they can influence user perspective and choice. Loosely fitting in with that theme I have come across a great article at the ACM Interactions magazine titled Pencils Before Pixels: A primer in hand-generated sketching by Mark Baskinger.

According to said article drawings and sketches can be powerful and persuasive representations of ideas, events, sequences, systems and objects. As part of a larger collaborative design process, hand drawing can serve as a key method for thinking, reasoning and exploring opportunities, yet inherently differs from wire-frames and conceptual models. Innately, interaction designers employ a variety of methods for representing ideas and information, both internally in a cognitive sense, and externally in the devices we employ to record, share and reflect. However, competency in sketching and drawing by hand seems to be diminishing across design disciplines making it a more highly desired skill in contemporary design practice. In addition, there seems to be an apparent phenomenon of fear when it comes to drawing ideas. For many practicing designers, they have convinced themselves that they can’t draw and thus position themselves to the periphery in concept generation…

Anyone with an ACM Digital Library subscription can read the full magazine article at http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1081.

Protoype game and New York virtual city model, Part 2

I have already posted details on the upcoming Prototype title by Radical Entertainment, here. While I don't like doing duplicate posts on projects, I came across a new video which I just had to post here. It details the approach, methods and conceptual thinking behind capturing New York for the game and is fascinating to watch, a must for anyone involved with urban modelling projects.

A number of people from the Prototype development team are interviewed, with several great quotes delivered, best one being the one about New York (i.e. the urban model) being the main character of the game, not just the backdrop for the game's story! The results look incredibly impressive, from capturing the city itself on 3D to populating it with avatars and vehicles, the cycle of sun and day and how it affects the city etc. While it does seem a bit too good to be true (and the developers address that issue too by saying it's not!) I have to say that if this title delivers 50% of what it promised in terms of its urban model, we'll easily have a new landmark piece of work in the area. Can't wait till the game is released for my XBox 360!

15th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology

Almost a week back from this year's IEEE Virtual Reality conference and while doing my usual search of upcoming conferences I have run across details for this year's ACM VRST (Virtual Reality Software And Technologies), a conference of equal stature and research quality with IEEE VR, only this time sponsored of course from a different organization.

ACM VRST is an annual conference devoted to the technical aspects of virtual reality. The first VRST was held in Singapore in 1994 and since then has been held in Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Taiwan, England, Korea, Canada, United States and Cyprus. This year, ACM VRST comes to France for the first time, at Bordeaux. With deadlines for late May, early June and mid July for full papers, short papers and posters respectively, it is an excellent opportunity for all virtual reality researchers to have their work disseminated at a top conference by leading experts of the field. Needless to say I plan to submit too, it will make a great follow-up to publishing at IEEE VR for me!

For more information on the deadline, the commitees and the conference itself check http://vrst2008.labri.fr/

Serious games and higher education

A team of researchers from UW-Madison, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working to develop “augmented-reality” games played with the aid of handheld devices. Their work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation and a Star School grant from the U.S. Department of Education. In one example, a handheld smart phone with an attached global positioning system (GPS) device is employed. The students interview virtual characters and visit actual sites where game events take place. They can go online to gather more information; they can investigate threats and develop corrective strategies as part of the game.

One scenario, developed by UW student James Matthews, casts the game player as a journalist covering the events of October 1967 at UW-Madison, when campus protests against Dow Chemical Co. erupted into violence. The game player encounters various incidents as he or she walks up Bascom Hill. The student writes a story and later compares it with reporting from 1967. "This is an easy fit in higher education" says Kurt Squire, an assistant professor in the School of Education and lead investigator on the project.

"It grew out of work we’d done at MIT to help environmental engineering students better understand the realities of doing fieldwork. The game player would get a phone call involving a toxic spill or some other environmental cleanup issue. In dealing with the problem, the students would have to account for such factors as budget and time. They would have to deal with the question, ‘What is good enough?’ It gave them the experience of doing environment science. It was real-world experience".

Another game application, designed to help Physics students grasp the concepts of electrostatics and magnetism, capitalizes on the graphics and interactivity of games. The fundamental concepts were not intuitive, so MIT physicist John Belcher developed computer-based visualizations for the students. "That helped" says Squire, "but students merely watched what was happening. There was no interactivity". So Squire and his colleagues worked with Belcher to put the students into the game. "We made the game player a charged particle that has to move through a field" he says. "The student created the visualizations". "There are lots of powerful opportunities here" says Squire. "With these games, you get the complexity of interactions. The potential for learning is unlimited".

Importing 3D urban models in Crysis

Courtesy of http://www.digitalurban.com/, it is fascinating to see some of their work involving the import of 3D urban models of London areas in games engines. Games have been for many years now the driving force behind computer graphics advances and therefore it makes perfect sense to see something like this developed by the people at the Digital Urban blog. The recently released Electronic Arts title Crysis comes with its own Sandbox allowing 3D models to be quickly and easily imported into the game engine and they have used that to import University College Quad, the London Eye and the Greater London Authority buildings running within the game.

The engine features realtime shadows direct from the geometry - a significant step forward in terms of visualisation. Previous work has focused on using the Oblivion engine and it is interesting to see one of their movies of a London 3D model on that as opposed to the Crysis engine as the differences are there to be noticed...

Work is on-going and I will update you on further updates on this (or you can alternatively check the excellent blog itself here) since this foray in combining state-of-the-art visualization engines that come available with commercial games and already-produced 3D urban models of the real-world certainly provides a lot of stimulating ideas for further work for everyone in the area.

SuperNatural puts on workshops and lectures at the Tate Modern in London

Supernatural Studios in London is hosting a series of afternoon workshops and evening lectures exploring computer animation and the current crossover in art, design and technology, coming up Tuesday 25 March / Wednesday 26 March 2008. For the series of lectures and workshops called Digital Dreams, there is an amazing line-up of speakers including Mike Milne, the Director of computer animation at Framestore CFC; Richard Seymour, co-founder of SeymourPowell; Scott Eaton, founder of Armature Studios; Duncan McWilliam, VFX Supervisor at The Moving Picture Company as well as other leading lights from Cinesite, and EA Games and Bunkspeed.

In the afternoons before each evening’s lecture, there will be a unique opportunity to meet other senior visual effects artists and get hands-on with the tools used in a huge variety of 3D disciplines from the creation of Hollywood blockbusters to commercials, games, product design and architecture. SuperNatural Studios also has over £25,000 worth of prizes to give away from the latest laptop from HP and NVIDIA, as well as full commercial licenses for Autodesk’s Maya and Bunkspeed’s Hypershot software to a training course of your choice at Escape Studios and even a chance to get your creation 3D printed. The afternoon workshops are free and the evening lectures are £8 - £6 for students. Book early before tickets run out!

Apple iPhone patent suggests a flip phone version

One of Apple's recent patent filings seems to indicate that it has at least considered the possibility of an iPhone flip phone of sorts, among other dual-screen possibilities. The application itself is for what's described as a "dual sided trackpad", which would be translucent and boast touch sensitive panels on each side, allowing it to be used both when it's opened or when it's covering the main display.

In the case of the iPhone, that would seem to offer yet another option for the oft-discussed iPhone nano, but the patent application doesn't stop there, with it also offering up possibilities for laptops and tablets based around the technology.

In the former case, the touchpad would open up a small window on the main display, allowing it to work like a SideShow display, while the tablet would boast a touchscreen encompassing the entire display. Needless to say, don't your hopes up for any of that just yet but patent filings are always a good indication for future plans of developer companies and speaking strictly for myself I always had a soft spot for flip phones...

Autodesk moves into middleware

At GDC, Autodesk announced its intention to buy French AI specialist Kynogon, makers of the Kynapse middleware, a move that has a lot of implications for the 3D Studio Max developing company. Intel (annual revenue $38 billion) has Havok and the Project Offset game engine. Nvidia (annual revenue $3.8 billion) has Ageia and, if you cast your mind back a couple of years, graphics optimisation specialist Hybrid too. It should be no surprise that big technology corporations are interested in game middleware.

But, despite owning the majority of most game developers’ asset creation pipelines, Autodesk (annual revenue $1.8 billion), hadn’t looked to move upstream into real-time smarts (back in the early 2000s, Alias tried the trick with the Maya Real-Time SDK but without much conviction). The surprise acquisition of French artificial intelligence company Kynogon, announced during GDC 2008, has changed that conventional wisdom however.

On the simplest level, Kynogon's Kynapse pathfinding engine provides a great fit with Autodesk’s HumanIK animation engine, itself a product of Alias’ acquisition of Kaydara back in 2004. Together with an as-yet unspecified physics engine, these three technologies are expected to be rolled out as an intelligent character animation package that can deal with navigating through dynamically changing environments.

"Our theme is Create, Animate and Integrate," confirms Rob Hoffman, Autodesk’s senior 3D product marketing manager. "On the creation side we have 3ds Max, Maya and Mudbox and on the animate side we have MotionBuilder. The integration portion is about having more elements of the overall pipeline". Part of Autodesk’s decision making seems to have revolved around its experience of selling the HumanIK system. It’s been used in high profile games such as EA Sports’ titles and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed but it was offered more as a consultancy service than a freely available middleware package like Kynapse.

"You have to crawl before you can walk, walk before you can run and run before you become an Olympian," Hoffman points out. "We started working with some Tier 1 customers to make sure the interest was there and that what they were expecting out of the software was also there. It was a safe way to begin and it’s starting to pay off". "At the moment, artists are having to work closely with coders to try and solve this animation issue," Gaubil, a Kynapse representative explains. "The bottleneck is the interface between art packages and the game engine. Only Autodesk can solve this problem".

But he’s looking beyond the short-term to consider the sort of future technology Autodesk will be able to create thanks to its financial muscle and sales teams. "The middleware market is changing fast. The industry desperately needs stable, longterm player who can offer cross-platform products. That’s what we aim to provide," he predicts. Hoffman also sees the current consolidation as a signifier of widespread change. "Not only are we seeing a blurring between industries such as games, films and design in terms of the tools that are being used, but most of the game facilities we’re talking to would prefer to buy their technology off-the-shelf."

Microsoft's XNA game studio to deliver games for smartphones?

An interesting piece of news regarding mobile gaming that has recently emerged stems from a Microsoft XNA chief Chris Satchell recent interview. He has given some hints as to the future of the XNA platform. Asked what was next for the XNA framework, given that the recently-announced Xbox Live Community Games distribution system is the last major piece of the XNA initiative to fall into place, Satchell said: "Well, we're extending to Zune this year, beyond that, I think there are other platforms we could extend to such as, for example, smartphones." Given Apple's committing to gaming on mobile devices yesterday, such a move would be an effective counter strike from Microsoft to promote its own Windows Mobile smartphone platform.

He also says that his team 'isn't focused on business model' and that he wants to enable community-created games first. Also touched upon in the interview is whether users will have to pay to play Xbox Live Community Games, to which Satchell responded: "We haven't decided that yet. To be honest, we're not really focused on the business model, we've been focusing on this pipeline and connecting people. Once we're in beta more will come to light. For now, it's just getting this distribution to work - it's a hell of a lot of work!"

You can check both parts of this interesting interview below, if you can read between the lines you can definitely see some of the future directions Microsoft plans to take regarding XBox, mobile gaming and game development in general.

http://www.developmag.com/interviews/136/QA-Chris-Satchell

http://www.developmag.com/interviews/138/QA-Chris-Satchell-Part-2

Predicting Crowd Behavior In Dense Urban Settings

One of the most interesting talks I sat through during my visit at IEEE VR 2008 was by Paul Torrens of Arizona State University talking about geosimulation as an engine for synthetic actors in urban models. Scientists who want to see how a crowd behaves in an emergency can now shout “Fire!” on a city street and watch everyone panic and run thanks to a newly developed computer simulation. The 3D model starts with patterns of human behavior and movement and uses them to simulate the behavior of a crowd in mob situations and pedestrian habits under certain building configurations, resulting in a virtual crowd video.

"Crowds are vital to the lifeblood of our cities,” said Paul. But, he adds, it is impractical “to establish live experiments with hundreds or thousands of people along busy streetscapes, to reproduce mob behavior during riots for the purposes of academic experimentation, or, to expect to replicate the life and death behavior under emergency situations in a fabricated fashion”. Torrens’s model uses what he calls an “agent-based methodology.” He can put individual people, or “agents,” each with different characteristics of age, sex, size and health, into the model and have them process information about the world around them. Their unique characteristic combinations make the agents interpret that information and react in different ways.

“It’s the same way we process information in the real world". Though you’re not aware of it, when you walk down a crowded street, your brain is constantly monitoring your surroundings and planning the path you will take to your destination while simultaneously monitoring for obstacles.

A prototype that Torrens has developed models the evacuation of a crowded area during a fire when there is only one point of escape, but he has used his method to develop a primitive model of a situation in which a disease spreads through casual contact, and he is attempting to create scenarios in which agitated crowds turn into unruly mobs. The model could also be used in planning cities to optimize walking space for pedestrians and alleviate congestion.

For more info check http://geosimulation.org/

3D urban model of London in Hellgate: London video game

A game released almost 6 months ago, which certainly has passed me by, and features an apocalyptic version of London in 3D is Hellgate: London, developed by Flagship Studios. While it failed to set the world on fire in sales it does offer the interesting alternative of being a Diablo/Counter Strike-clone ... only set in the UK capital, now invaded by demons various other ghoulish creatures (as you would!).

What is even more interesting is the approach the creators of the game used for the urban modelling workpackage. According to Flagship CEO Bill Roper when asked about modelling London, "it was a big challenge. One of the things we do is to have this concept of meta asset sets. There is one massive set that we create for a setting, and from that we make different thematic choices, allowing us to create different kinds of shapes. You might have really wide boulevards or winding back-alleys, and we can move between these and larger outdoor areas like parks. All of those have certain core assets that they would share and there are a lot of unique styles that get thrown into those. We can do lots of things to make them feel distinct and actually play differently from one another, particularly by using props."

"If you take one of the areas that have been procedurally generated, one of the things that will have been decided by the algorithm is whether this is to be, for example, a military stand-off point – so it puts in tanks and overturned vehicles and tattered tents and barricades. Or if it’s a mercenary response area, then we have ambulances and police vehicles. Or if this is more of an urban area, those props get pulled out, and you’ll see normal cars and London buses and things like that. So even thematically, what’s there can be different, and even the placement of those things is randomised as well."

"When quizzed about not opting to painstakingly recreate areas of London accurately, apart from Landmarks, he replies "from the outset we wanted to do something that was divergent from anything we’d done before. Obviously we’d done a high fantasy setting, and we’d done a gothic fantasy setting, both within completely created worlds. We wanted to do a near-future real-world basis for our next game. It would make the artistic challenges more exciting for us. We also really love London – it’s an international city; a lot of people around the world know it; it has great landmarks we could play with; it has a great mystic background. We could get a lot of cool gameplay above and below ground – that was important to us. We wanted somewhere players could recognise."

"One decision in game-design is where you are going to need players to stretch. For us we thought players were going to be stretching in terms of just understanding what the game was. It’s an action-RPG with FPS elements and it’s got this and that. It’s a lot like Diablo in many aspects and Counter-Strike in other ways – that was going to be something we’d have to spend a lot of time on – so a highly recognised city was something people could lay a foundation on. London wasn’t only a fun challenge, it provided a solid anchor point for people. We could go on and do other crazy stuff and they wouldn’t have too much to absorb all at once."

Pixar video talk on the Human Story Of Computer Animation

Following from the previous post here's another incredibly interesting vid talk, more in the form of an expert panel discussion, again from the respective leaders of the field of human computer animation. An intriguing absolute must-see for anyone in the computer graphics or indeed computer animation field!

These include Brad Bird (Writer/Director, The Incredibles, Pixar Animation Studios), Ed Catmull (Co-Founder and President, Pixar Animation Studios), Alvy Ray Smith (Co-Founder of four centers of computer graphics excellence (Altamira, Pixar, Lucasfilm, New York Tech) and a Microsoft Fellow), Andrew Stanton (Writer/ Director, Finding Nemo, Pixar Animation Studios) and Michael Rubin (Moderator, Author of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution).

Video talk on the Procedural Inc. and CityEngine 3D urban modelling approaches

Writing this blog entry while waiting for my San Francisco flight from Reno, Nevada where this year's IEEE Virtual Reality conference was held. I was here in order to present a position statement paper at the Virtual Cityscapes: Key Research Issues in Modeling Large-Scale Immersive Urban Environments workshop (more details on the workshop here).

One of the most interesting and impressive talks I sat in during this workshop was the one by Pascal Mueller, PhD candidate and research assistant at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. I was aware of the work, which is quite possibly leading in the field of procedural architectural and large scale urban modelling, but it was really impressive to see it summarised in a 40-minute talk. Moreover, I just found out that a vid of a previous talk of Pascal's (similar to the one I saw) has been posted on YouTube, this time for a Google Tech Talk, it is essential viewing for anyone interested in interactive 3D city modelling...

The site of the spin-off company generated by this work can be found at http://www.procedural.com/ and again it is well worth visiting to check out the very high-profile publications stemming from it but also the numerous demo vids. The only criticism I could level at all this (and I'd be really really struggling here!) is the fact that the work seems more geared to delivering fictitious content than GIS-based models with accuracy that can be used in more sensitive and critical applications. Still, that's probably missing the point, this is research that is at the moment defining 3D urban modelling and well worth checking out!

iPhone and mobile games, John Carmack speaks out

ID Software co-founder and technical director (plus also legendary games programming guru!) John Carmack has come out in praise of Apple's plans for developers and its iPhone. In a post over at Slashdot, he said that the upcoming ability for developers to sell their creations via iTunes' new AppStore is the key part of the strategy, which is outlined here.

"Just based on the blurbs, it looks very good - a simulator plus debugging on the native device is the best of both worlds, and a 70 per cent royalty deal for apps over iTunes is quite good," he said.

Carmack added: "The iTunes distribution channel is really a more important aspect than a lot of people understand. "The ability to distribute larger applications than the over-the-air limits and effectively market your title with more than a dozen character deck name, combined with the reasonable income split make this look like a very interesting market. This type of developer/customer interaction is probably the wave of the future for mobile devices, it will be interesting to see how quickly the other players can react. Based on our experiences with the carriers, I am betting not very quickly".

He also said that ID had already applied to be an official developer, but didn't have any insider info as yet, adding: "I think Steve [Jobs, Apple CEO] is still pissed at me over some negative comments I made about iPod development tools a while ago".

Carmack had previously said that he felt Apple was "not supportive" of games on its iPhone, although clearly the new strategy will change that view. At last year's Apple yearly developer event, Carmack joined Jobs on stage to debut the developer's new Rage technology, which runs on Mac as well as PC. ID recently opened a mobile games division.

Serious Games Institute Event, Coventry, 4th March

Yesterday I attended a Virtual World, Wireless, Mobile, Video, Sound, GIS and Augmented Reality Technology Showcase event at the SGI (Serious Games Institute) in Coventry in a range of digital media and communications technologies. The event's purpose was to showcase the use of advanced and innovative technologies to enrich the culture, heritage and tourism experience and make it globally accessible to the widest audience.

The workshop featured demonstrations and innovative interactive displays from industry leaders and was a good opportunity to get a comprehensive overview of the potential benefits of a holistic and integrated approach to technology solutions for culture, heritage and tourism. Managers, planners and developers of culture, met with digital media specialists to explore how to get best value from integrating these technologies to create innovative and high value experiences.

Here's the agenda of the event:

09:00 – 09:30 Registration & networking
09:30 – 10:00 Introduction and Overview of Emerging Technologies An outline of the day and introduction to emerging technologies and their application to culture, heritage and tourism by David Wortley, Director of SGI
10:00 – 11:30 Session One - 3D Visualisation of Heritage Sites Invited speakers include Professor Bob Stone, Mike Gogan, Dick Davies, David Neil and Martyn Ware with examples of projects from around the world, including Rome 400AD
11:30 – 13:00 Session Two – Augmented Reality, Mobile and integrated real/virtual world Technologies for Culture, Heritage and Tourism Invited speakers include Ambient Performance, Giunti Labs, Implenia, Blackridge Games and Stratford Unplugged
13:00 – 14:00 Networking Lunch and Interactive Demonstrations Delegates will have an opportunity to see and interactive some highly innovative technologies including the launch of a brand new augmented reality experience.
14:00 – 15:30 Session Three – Serious Games and Educational Technologies for Culture, Heritage and Tourism Invited speakers include Blitz Games, Immersive Education and Playgen
15:30 – 17:00 Session Four - Creating a Total and Memorable Experience Invited speakers include Venue Solutions, The Virtual Heritage Company and representatives from end users involved in culture, heritage and tourism
17:00 – 18:30 Drinks Reception and virtual cabaret & disco Delegates can network, relax and be entertained by artists performing in a virtual cabaret then dance the evening away at the Wheelies Second Life Disco. This session will be jointly hosted by Implenia and Enable Enterprises Ltd.

There are more events like these scheduled at SGI in Coventry so if you are around the area it's worth checking their site at http://www.seriousmesinstitute.co.uk/ for future listings!