EngD position available at Bournemouth University

Applications are invited for a fully-funded Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in the Centre for Digital Entertainment (CDE) at Bournemouth University, UK, a collaboration between the University of Bath and Bournemouth University, with Salisbury Hospital. This is a 4-year programme which embeds a Research Engineer (RE) in a company (Salisbury Hospital on this occasion), who, supported by an academic supervisor (myself for this particular project), will work on projects of immediate industrial relevance. 75% of the RE's time will be spent in industry. These projects will form the basis of a Doctoral submission by portfolio thesis for the award of an Engineering Doctorate in Digital Media.

This project proposes the exploration of a technology such as gaming-specific BCIs (brain-computer interfaces) for the enhancement of post-stroke rehabilitation. A prototype addressing this type of rehabilitation, using a low cost technology, could have significant benefits over existing traditional physiotherapy approaches, from the associated cost to the mobility and the more accurate online monitoring of multiple patients' progress, to name but a few. I will be supervising this doctorate so please do not hesitate to contact me with any queries or applications! You can find more information about the positon on the following link;

http://digital-entertainment.org/?page_id=760&preview=true

Unreal running on Flash

If you want to see Epic Games' Unreal engine running on a browser via Flash, you can now check out the very familiar Epic Citadel demo online (here). Epic Citadel is of course the tech demo that was released to showcase the interactive Unreal engine for iOS devices a while back (and now doubling up as a tech demo for the Flash export functionality).

While the export to Flash functionality is only available for commercial licensees currently (which is unfortunate as competitors such as Unity have gone beyond that and have already made it freely available) the quality and potential of this is undeniable.

Original Prince of Persia source code released

Jordan Mechner has released (officially) the code for the seminal platform game Prince of Persia. The classic 1989 game which pioneered rotoscoping and was made available on many platforms has seen many sequels and even a movie adaptation. Its creator only found the code recently (it was considered long lost) and it can be downloaded here.

Jordan Mechner is currently working on a remake of another (even older) title of his, Karateka (which I played before I even saw Prince of Persia on an old 8086 PC). I personally think it is a fantastic move when games such as this one, despite their obvious age, have their source code made available for the programming community, so it's worth visiting the link above and downloading this.

CryEngine 3.4 version now available

Amidst all the teaser rumours about Crysis 3 Crytek has found the time to release a new version of their free SDK for CryEngine. This is now at version 3.4.0 and features revamped DirectX 11 tessellation, a multi-layer navigation mesh, improved skin rendering and an advanced/improved/extended glass shader. There are also a variety of bug fixes too.

You can see a demo vid for the new version of the SDK above and also download the free engine here.

Google Project Glass

This technology has been making the headlines just about everywhere the last few days; Google has now announced an eyewear prototype technology called Project Glass which will display augmented reality functionality over one of the eyes. This will allow the superimposition of virtual information, of which the most interesting one (currently anyway) is Google Maps.

The video above describes the technology in a better way; the implied future potential however is incredible for navigation (and many other application context areas). The technology at the moment has no price and Google has not really said when or indeed whether this will go for sale. It could however be an impressive leap forward should this be available to the public and also developers and researchers. More information can be found here.

Leisure Suit Larry now on Kickstarter

I blogged about this a few months ago but it appears that the mooted/discussed Leisure Suit Larry remake (with the original creator Al Lowe involved) has now hit the increasingly popular crowdsourcing solution via Kickstarter. Replay Games who are working with Al to resurrect the game for a number of platforms (including mobile ones and also XBLA/PSN) using Unity are looking for $500,000 from fans in order to remake the classic 1987 adventure title (which was one of the first adventure games I ever played myself).

More info on this here, hopefully they'll manage to raise the funds needed in time (early May).

Gamr7 and Urban PAD is no more

Sad to report that one of the automated/semi-automated urban modelling solutions which I reported on in the past (several times in fact) is no longer a going concern; French developer Gamr7 has folded and the tool itself (Urban PAD) is also no more. There is a short announcement (and explanation) on the website of the company here.
This is quite unfortunate as it was a very promising tool and it definitely made inroads over the last few years. While there are of course other solutions still available, it is sad to see one that has been progressing for 5 years now come to an end.