Altergaze, an alternative to the Rift?

With the Oculus Rift making headlines almost every day I thought it would be interesting to also look at other VR alternatives. One of these is Altergaze, which has already managed a successful Kickstarter campaign. What is very interesting about this (amongst many other things), as opposed to something like the Oculus Rift, is that it is 3D printed and not a headset per se as you can move it next and away from the eyes very easily, thus going in and out of VR in a quick fashion.

More on the official site here.

Unreal 4.1 released

The new version of the Unreal engine has now received a substantial update bringing it up to version 4.1. Notable changes include the support of XBox One, PS4, SteamOS and Linux.

You can read the full list of the many other changes/upgrades here. 

Atari's E.T. cartridges now unearthed

The legendary story of Atari's 1982 E.T. game comes to a close (almost), as the urban myth of the disastrous game's cartridges (today considered widely as one of the worst games of all time) being buried in the desert is now proven true. As part of a documentary, a team has now unearthed a number of cartridges in the New Mexico desert and provided pictures of the event as proof.

The pictures show a number of cartridges but noone really knows how many cartridges were buried, with rumours still ranging all the way up to millions. 

Read more about this here. 

The story of the UK games tax breaks

As I blogged before the games tax break for UK devs is now a reality; recently I came across a very interesting article in Develop magazine which details, from TIGA founder's Fred Hasson's point of view, how this came about, all the obstacles faced and the journey of the idea/campaign through the last ~15 years. 

This is a very interesting read and can be found here.

New Unreal Tournament game in the works

Epic Games has announced they will be working on a brand new Unreal Tournament game, using the new, 4th version of their Unreal engine. This will be the first Unreal Tournament game since 2007 (when Unreal 3 Tournament 3 was released) and is as such very eagerly awaited.

More information about this can be found here.

Springer book chapter publication

A Springer book chapter publication I co-authored is now available, as is the book containing it, "Virtual, Augmented Reality and Serious Games for Healthcare 1". This has the chapter I have worked on with another two Bournemouth University colleagues titled "A State of the Art Survey in the Use of Video Games for Upper Limb Stroke Rehabilitation".

For accessing both the book and chapter see the official Springer site here.

NET 2014 publication accepted

A conference paper I have co-authored with colleagues from Bournemouth University has been accepted for the NET 2014 (Networking for Education in Healthcare) conference. The paper is titled "An approach in teaching dementia care in higher education via the use of gaming technology". The conference is to take place in September 2014, at Cambridge, UK.

You can see the preliminary programme here.

GALA 2014 IPC

I have been added on the Program Committee for the GALA 2014 (the Games and Learning Alliance) conference, a conference with a strong focus on serious games. This is taking place in Bucharest, Romania between the 2nd and the 4th of July 2014.

More information here on the official site of the conference.

Lecturer job at Bournemouth University in Games Technology

The Department of Creative Technologies, within the Faculty of Science & Technology, at Bournemouth University where I am also based is seeking to appoint a talented, enthusiastic and motivated lecturer in the area of games programming/technology.

You will be qualified to Doctoral level or be able to demonstrate equivalent industrial experience in games programming/technology. You will be expected to have a strong understanding of C++ and C# programming (plus related paradigms such as object oriented programming) and also APIs such as OpenGL or DirectX. In addition, you will be expected to have familiarity with contemporary game engines such as Unreal, Unity or CryEngine. Industry experience in the form of published game titles would be advantageous.

More information here.

ICGIP 2014 Program Committee

I have been invited to be on the Program Committee of ICGIP 2014 (the 6th International Conference on Graphic and Image Processing), which is to take place in Beijing, China, between the 24th and the 26th of October this year.

You can find out more about the conference on its official site here.