Chemistry via Minecraft?

The University of Hull has a very interesting project which uses the Minecraft game for the visualisation of molecular chemistry. 

The project (called MolCraft) has generated a lot of very positive press and can in fact be downloaded from the official University of Hull website here.

Another great example of how Minecraft and similar gaming technologies can be used for educational purposes on "serious" subjects".

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.

Microsoft's DeLorean research

A recent technical report paper published by Microsoft has been making headlines in the relevant press; the work described in the paper is called -rather imaginatively- DeLorean and focuses on the production of a speculative cloud solution with the aim being that of reducing the impact of latency in games.

The full paper is very interesting can be found -and downloaded- here.

BU Research Chronicle

Bournemouth University has recently published the third edition of the BU Research Chronicle magazine, which highlights key research work undertaken at the University in a variety of disciplines. A doctorate student I am supervising, Karsten Pedersen, is featured on page 25.

You can access the BU Research Chronicle magazine in full here.

NASA uses Oculus Rift and Kinect

For what is quite possibly the last blog post of 2013; the following video comes from NASA who demonstrate the use of a combination of the Oculus Rift and Kinect in order to control a robotic  arm.

 

The video is very short but the potential of this is great, it also shows how (relatively inexpensive) gaming technology is already used for prototypes for very serious, non-gaming applications.

CDE doctorate training centre renewed by EPSRC

The Centre for Digital Entertainment (CDE) doctorate training centre, a joint venture the University of Bath and Bournemouth University, has been successful in a renewal grant by EPSRC.

This is fantastic news for both Universities and also everybody involved, supervisors (I am supervising a number of students on this scheme), students and industry alike.

 

 

 You can read more about CDE here and the renewal news here.

Minecraft, the Ordnance Survey and an in-game map of Britain

This has made the news recently and is worth checking out as it is easily one of the best "serious" uses of the Minecraft game phenomenon.

Ordnance Survey has used their data to recreate, in-game, over 220,000 square kilometres of mainland Great Britain and also surrounding islands, all done by an intern in the company. This was by using more than 22 billion blocks to put this all together.

 

 

You can read more about the process here, and, more importantly, also download this and use it (you will need to have Minecraft installed).

Digits, a device for hand motion recognition

A research project from Microsoft Research, Newcastle University and the University of Crete has been recently making headlines; it is a device called Digits which is basically a bracelet with infrared sensors and a ring of LEDs used to detect and then reconstruct the hand motions of the user wearing it in 3D.
 

 

The device isn't perfect (crossed fingers for example seem to be an issue) but seems to work overall really well and could not only complement some of Microsoft's own Kinect limitations but also used as a stand-alone contraption for a number of application areas requiring different types of hand interaction.

Hopefully this will make it to retail at some point as there is definitely plenty of potential in it.

EU Leonardo GameWise project

An EU-funded Leonardo Transfer of Innovation application I have been involved with has been successful, with the project to begin in September 2012 and finish in September 2014. The project is called GameWise and has received an EU funding (as part of the Lifelong Learning programme) of 250,000 Euros in total.

Led by CV2 in Denmark and with a variety of partners involved (one being Bournemouth University of course) from other countries such as Spain, Norway and the Netherlands, the project is set to focus on the creation of new jobs in Europe by the transfer and adaptation of a model for closer cooperation between VET institutions and the surrounding world of work. As soon as there is an official website for the project (which will be in the next few weeks) I will post another update for this.

EEG BCI-based adaptive music research project

Brain computer interfaces (BCIs) operating via EEGs are used in a variety of projects and interactions and I have just come across one which is quite different, as it is more music than interaction related. Academics from the Universities of Plymouth and Reading in the UK are collaborating on an EPSRC-funded project which aims to use EEG-driven BCIs to generate music according to the individual state of the user using the prototype. The idea is to eventually attempt to use this as means of therapy for afflictions such as, for example, depression.

The full story of the project (including more details on how the prototype will work) can be found here on The Engineer website.

Contact lens with embedded display

University of Washington and Aalto University researchers have now developed a contact lens which can display (wirelessly of course) a single pixel image on an eye contact lens. Testing has also been carried out (though not with human subjects).

Furthemore, research is now carried out for a multi-pixel version of this as an extension of the current prototype though already the potential applications are limitless, particularly on ones with augmented reality connotations. While applications such as military usage for example are obvious, it would be fantastic to see this used in gaming as it could be used as a great enhancement of contemporary visualisation technology.

Collaboration with 4T2 on an EPSRC-funded EngD

Today a student I will be supervising for his doctorate under the Bournemouth University EPSRC-funded project called CDE (Centre For Digital Entertainment) has started working on his research. I have posted about the CDE before; the purpose of the project is to train the next generation of leaders in the Film/Visual Effects, Computer Games, Virtual Worlds and Animation industries. More information about CDE can be found here.

Part of this is placing the student within an industrial environment throughout the course of the EngD; the company involved with this doctorate, which is also co-sponsoring the student himself is 4T2, a games development company based locally in Bournemouth. You can find out more about 4T2 and their portfolio of past efforts at the company's official website here. I am very much looking forward to this collaboration, which will be lasting for 4 years in total, as it is a unique opportunity to infuse academic research in games development (with a strong software engineering focus on this occasion) with a real-world, live context.

GameiT conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on the 13th of October

The EU funded project I/Bournemouth University have been a part of for the last 2 years called GameiT and with game-based learning pedagogy firmly as its focus is coming to a conclusion in October. As part of that we will be launching a handbook with recommendations/chapters from each individual partner on how to incorporate games in a classroom. This book will be launched at a mini-conference/event on October 13th 2011 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

There is the intention to establish the conference as a recurring tradition, where educators, researchers, game developers, politicians and other interested parties meet to follow the newest tendencies in the field, exchange ideas, establish networks and – hopefully – found new exciting projects. There are also a number of speakers from the general video games/game-based learning area invited for keynote speeches.

You can find out more details about the conference here, whereas information about the EU Leonardo Transfer of Innovation project that spawned it can be found here.

Intel's CPU-powered new anti-aliasing technique

Intel has outlined a new type of anti-aliasing which can be achieved on the CPU in real-time. This is titled morphological anti-aliasing (or in short MLAA) and operates by applying a filter to every frame of the real-time application. MLAA will blend pixels on the edges with surrounding areas by looking for Z- and U-shaped edges which are then broken down into L-shaped ones (see pic below for an example of this).

Because of this the technique can be carried out procedurally in a very reliable and consistent manner (unlike other anti-aliasing techniques) and could be particularly useful for mobile devices too (where CPUs and GPUs are now one chipset). This can be an important computer graphics development as it has been predicted (for a few years now it has to be said) that CPUs will enter the rendering pipeline far more prominently. The full Intel article can be found here and there is even some source code for experimentation there.

Levitation art project via the use of EEG

As I am conducting an experiment using EEG devices at the moment, here is a very cool art installation, created by a team at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where students have combined an EEG BCI device with a flying harness. This enables the individual with the EEG to levitate using input directly from the headset, i.e. fly using their thoughts.

Called the "Infinity Simulator" (while the art installation is called "The Ascent"), the set up will also allow users to trigger light, sound and video effects using the EEG device, other than of course flying. This effort uses the Emotiv EEG device (which I have previously discussed in this blog), is described by its creators as a platform similar to Wii or Kinect and looks particularly impressive in its prototype, work-in-progress form (check out the video above).

Crysis 2 engine to be used for VR army simulator

In anticipation of the release of the Crysis 2 SDK and level editor to the public, it appears that the US Army has already started using the engine to power a training simulator titled Dismounted Soldier.

For this the soldiers in training will be using a wearable head-tracking VR helmet as well as a microphone, stereo speakers, body-mounted sensors and last but not least handheld weapons. More information about Dismounted Soldier and the way it operates (plus screenshots and a vid) can be found on the official website here.

New PhD studentship advertised at Bournemouth University

The John Kent Institute in the School of Tourism at Bournemouth University is advertising a new PhD studentship, for which I will be the second supervisor for. This is a fully-funded position to begin in October 2011. The John Kent Institute in Tourism builds on BU's research strengths and research potential, focusing on specific areas of interest within Tourism which attract national and international recognition.

Research will be encouraged to be multi-disciplinary, embodying the BU spirit of cross-school collaboration and support. There are already 4 students on the programme who started in October 2010.

More information on the studentship itself, titled "Location based services in the context of tourism from a consumer-centric perspective", can be found here while details on the scheme itself can be found here.

Argon, the mobile AR web browser

Funded by Alcatel-Lucent through its University Innovations Program (who a few years ago partly also funded my PhD), a new mobile web browser with augmented reality extensions, called Argon, has been built by researchers at Georgia Tech University.

Argon operates by taking video from the phone's camera and then rendering content on top of it. The prototype/initial release operates by taking any content from the Apple iPhone's mobile Safari web browser and "pushing it" out on virtual billboards. More interestingly, the creators of Argon promise 3D content support in soon-to-come releases. Other platforms, like Android, are also to be supported in the future.

Read more about Argon and KHARMA, the platform it is affiliated with, at https://research.cc.gatech.edu/polaris.

Project Live3D

Project Live3D, an incredibly interesting project created by a team at Washington Universisty, is a web-based application that allows users to update the geometry and textures in Google Earth and then see what the world looks like. This would mean that an actual, 'in the moment', 3D model would be presented. As a result, users are encouraged to take one of the many outdoor webcam images and embed them in three-dimensional space, thusly constructing a scene with up-to-date images/textures (see video below).

The Live3D app can also, in addition to the above, calibrate camera images and then infer the camera's location and orientation. Developed by Austin Abrams, a doctoral student in computer science at the University, along with faculty advisor Robert Pless and former graduate student Nathan Jacobs and undergraduate Jessica Graham, this is well worth checking out at the link below as it is an interesting take in bringing Google Maps to life.

http://www.projectlive3d.com/