SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 poster paper accepted for publication

A poster paper I am included as a co-author in has now been accepted for publication at SIGGRAPH Asia 2014. The poster paper is titled "Object Weathering Simulation Avoiding Texture Space Stretching and Discontinuities".

The event this year takes place in early December in Shenzhen, China.

More information about SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 on the official conference site here.

EU Erasmus+ bid successful

It's been confirmed that an EU Erasmus+ bid I am involved with as a co-investigator (led by Viden Djurs in Denmark and involving a number of other European partners from countries such as the Netherlands, Spain and Malta, 7 in total including Bournemouth University and the Danish PI) has been successful.

The project is called GameBiz and will be running from October 2014 onwards for 2 years. It has been funded under Key Action "Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices", Action "Strategic Partnerships" and Field "Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training" of the Erasmus+ scheme. 

The funding received is approximately 300,000 Euros in total.

I will post more about this next month once the project gets underway. More about Erasmus+ and Strategic Partnerships here.

Great Britain geology recreated in Minecraft

Around this time last year I did a blog post, found here, about Ordnance Survey recreating Great Britain using Minecraft. 

The British Geological Survey has now done something similar to this (and inspired by the original Ordnance Survey attempt), with the added distinction however that this also has geological information too below ground surface.

You can read more about the effort (and download it) here.

Samsung VR headset announced

Another contender enters the race of VR headsets, joining high-profile efforts like the one from Sony (Project Morpheus), clearly showing the potency and potential of this area. 

This time it is developed by Samsung and called Gear VR, with the device powered by the tech behind the Oculus Rift. There seems to be a strong mobile focus to this too, which is not surprising given Samsung's position in that marketplace.

More information about this, including a statement by Oculus' own John Carmack, here.

Unreal 4 Marketplace news

With the Unreal 4 community now growing (see previous blog post on the license fee waiver for academic use) Epic Games has also made a very recent announcement on the Marketplace functionality offered for the popular engine, which now includes the opportunity to buy and sell content for use within the tool.

You can read more about this here.

Unreal 4 now free for academic use

Unreal engine version 4 since its release this past spring has carried a small monthly price tag; this was waived the other day for the purposes of academic use.

 

 Taken directly from an official Epic Games blog the company mentions; "Unreal Engine 4 is now free for academic use, including personal copies for students enrolled in accredited video game development, computer science, art, architecture, simulation, and visualization programs! All educators can now have unrestricted access to the engine simply by contacting us at unrealengine.com/education."

You can read more about this here, this is indeed a very welcome move and bound to give the popular engine an even bigger boost and bigger user base.