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.