Graphics and Gaming Group at SIGGRAPH
George Kelly, who works on the Procedural City Generation project, has had a research poster presentation accepted for the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference. This is a great opportunity to discuss and share results on this work with graphics researchers from all around the world. The conference takes place in Boston at the end of July.
New Research Funding Obtained
We are delighted to announce that we have been successful in obtaining funding for a new research project entitled “Automatic Building Generation for 3D Applications”. The funding comes from the Strand 1 postgraduate R&D; skills programme and will allow us to employ another postgraduate researcher for a period of two years. The project is designed to complement the existing project on Procedrual City Generation and we hope that the two together will lead to some exciting and interesting results. We will be looking to recruit a new postgraduate researcher for this very soon. Watch this space!
Thank You
Thanks to everyone who helped us out by turning up at the testing day for the Virtual Cinematography project before Christmas. We got lots of useful results and feedback. James is currently finalising his thesis and it should be available for download here soon.
Testing of Virtual Cinematography
We are looking for volunteers from the ITB staff and student body to help us carry out testing of the new camera system for Quake which our postgrad student, James Kneafsey, has created for the virtual cinematography project. The testing session will take place on Wednesday 14th December between 2 and 4pm. If you think you could spare a half an hour that afternoon please email Hugh. The testing will largely involve getting you to play our modified version of Quake for 20 mintutes or so and blow up as many monsters as possible. What could be easier? Experienced Quake/FPS players and total novices are equally welcome so you’ve no excuse …
New Researcher
We are very pleased to welcome a new researcher to the Graphics and Gaming Group. George Kelly has recently joined us and is going to be working on the Procedural City Generation project for the next two years.
Cinematic Quake Video
We have just uploaded a short 45 second video showing the Cinematic Quake camera which is currently being built as part of the Virtual Cinematography project. The video shows a segment of Quake gameplay where the standard first-person camera has been replaced with the current implementation of our cinematic camera. The camera automatically chooses different viewpoint and camera angles according to ganeplay events occuring onscreen.. Go here to download it.
Science Week Activities
The Graphics and Gaming Group are contributing to Science Week this week (14th and 15th November) by providing an interactive showcase of computer graphics and games concepts at the ITB campus. Visiting primary and secondary school students can create their own computer games and view demonstrations of creating artificial gravity for a virtual “ball world”, moving around by detecting arrow key presses, and how to make things happen when two “sprites” on screen. These activities were created by Matt Smith. Full details of Science Week at ITB can be found on the main ITB website.
3D Campus Simulation Downloads
We have just added some downloads from our 3D campus simulation project. These are a VRML world which allows the user to explore the ITB campus through their web browser and a video segment of a flythrough of our 3D campus model. Go hereto look at these materials..
New Undergraduate Graphics and Gaming Projects
A number of our B.Sc. in Computing students have undertaken games related research for their final year projects for the 2005/2006 academic year. Some information about these projects can be found on the undergrad projects page.
Neural Bot Video Downloads
We have just updated the web page for our recently completed project on neural network learning techniques for agents in games. Included are two videos which can be downloaded showing bots controlled by neural networks navigating their way around some game levels. Go here to download the videos and find out more about the project.
Procedural City Generation for Computer Games
We have recently been awarded funding for a new research project entitled Procedural City Generation for Computer Games. The funding comes from the Strand 1 Postgraduate R&D; Skills Programme and will allow us to employ a new postgraduate researcher for a period of two years. The idea of the project is to develop techniques for automatically generating urban geometry (e.g. streets, buildings and so on) using procedural techniques for use in computer games and other interactive 3D applications. Recruitment of a new researcher is currently underway and we expect the project to formally commence in November.
DIGRA Conference Vancouver
Members of the group travelled to Vancouver, Canada in late June to attend the Digital Games Research Association conference. Ross Graham and James Kneafsey presented papers describing their work to the conference attendees. Both were extremely well received and we were particularly pleased that Ross’s paper, entitled Realistic Agent Movement in Dynamic Game Environments, was chosen by the conference commitee to appear in the Selected Papers volume for the conference. The papers selected for this volume are regarded by the organisers as representing the best games research currently being carried out worldwide.
Eurographics Ireland Chapter Workshop
The Graphics and Gaming Group recently hosted the sixth Eurographics Ireland Chapter Workshop at ITB. This took place on June 2nd and consisted of a day of paper presentations from researchers around Ireland involved in Computer Graphics. Presenters came from Trinity College Dublin, Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, University College Cork, University of Ulster, and Dublin City University. An exciting range of work was described, covering areas such as games research, human figure modeling, 3D graphics for mobile devices, and computer graphics for education. Full workshop details can be found on the EGIreland website. Next years workshop is now scheduled to be held at the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology.