Epic’s Tim Sweeney on “Programming for future CPUs and GPUs”

Tim Sweeney, the CEO and Chief Architect of Epic Games, will give a distinguished lecture at 10:30am this Friday 2 November on “Programming for future CPUs and GPUs” at Johns Hopkins in room 3 of Shaffer Hall. The talk is open to the public.

Sweeney is doing R&D work on game, graphics, and programming language technology aimed at the large-scale multicore CPUs that will be prevalent in the next decade. In his lecture, Sweeney will be sharing his thoughts on the major changes coming in programming practices and computing architectures in that time frame.

Tim Sweeney founded Epic Games in 1991 and wrote a number of early shareware games. In 1995, he began developing the Unreal Engine, which has since grown into the game industry’s leading technology. Now on its third generation, the Unreal Engine is used in over 150 leading-edge games for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3; Epic’s current games include Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3.

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Social Dynamics of Online Games

IT Conversations has a podcast with host John Udell talking to Dmitri Williams and Jake Vickers about the Social Dynamics of Online Games. Dmitri Williams is an assistant professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication who studies the social dynamics of online games. He is also a member of a World of Warcraft guild in which George Vickers, a 17-year-old college student, plays a key leadership role. The conversation explores the ways in which leadership and organizational skills can be developed in an online multiplayer game.

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Student scholarships to the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Fancisco

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) will award 25 scholarships to send qualified students to the 2008 Game Developers Conference. GDC is where game development professionals gather to share ideas and build the skills that the industry needs. This year’s GDC will be held 18-20 February 2007 in San Francisco.

Applicants must be student members of IGDA, but becoming one is not very expensive ($30/year) and is probably a good idea if you are serious about a career in the game industry. You can get more information about joining IGDA and the benefits of membership online. Once you have joined, you can apply online for the GDC scholarship. Applications must be submitted on or before Friday, 7 December 2007.

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Sims creator Will Wright: Video games do no harm to children

The British Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Culture Media and Sport have commissioned an independent report on the effects of violent games and the Internet on children. The effort is lead by Tanya Byron, a British psychologist and TV personality. The study has a web site where people can enter their views.

Today’s Guardian has an interview with Sims creator Will Wright that focuses on the same issues:

Q: We’ve just started a government review in the UK into the affect of games on children. Do you think attitudes are starting to be a shift?

Wright: I think there’s always been a generational divide between people who play games and people who don’t. As people get older you see more and more parents that played games as they were kids now playing games with their kids. In some sense I think the cultural acceptance of games is inevitable just because people are going to have grown up having this technology. As you get a broader set of people playing games, you get a broader set of games to appeal to those people. I think that’s the slow, inevitable process going on here. It goes in fits and starts over time – if there’s a school shooting, it’s a case of ‘did they play games or not’: you don’t really hear much about what movies they watch or what books they read. But 50 years ago that’s exactly what you heard, did they read To Kill A Mockingbird or whatever it is. They would blame social ills on anything that was at hand. (link)

There’s lots more in the interview, including Wright talking about what games he plays.

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CSI in Second Life

It might seem like we’re obsessed with Second Life, but the reason that we’ve had some many posts about it lately is that there are new and interesting things going on with it. It’s a good example that the technologies underlying games are broadly applicable and their use will continue to evolve.

I’m not a CSI viewer, but I know it’s a very popular main stream program, so an episode that takes place partly in Second Space might be significant. Many are expecting a rapid convergence of computers and television that will come to full fruition as digital television becomes mandatory around the world.

Second Life is bracing itself for an influx of new members this coming week with the long awaited episode of CSI:NY does Second Life to be shown in the United States on Wednesday. The episode will see Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) entering Second Life to pursue a killer who has killed a Second Life user in a case of virtual stalking gone too far. CSI:NY fans will be encouraged to join Second Life and investigate the case by following a link on the CBS website. CSI:NY will have three options for CSI-related inworld activities. The first option will allow viewers to walk around virtual New York buildings and visit a CSI lab and play forensic games. (link)

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Second Life and education

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a Live Discussion on Getting an Academic Life in Second Life.

“Colleges around the world are opening virtual campuses in Second Life, a three-dimensional, colorful environment that can be accessed via a computer. One of those campuses is New Orleans Island, which was built by Merrill L. Johnson, an administrator at the University of New Orleans. What is the appeal of Second Life, and what kind of classes does the university hold there? Is Second Life a useful distance- education platform or just frivolous entertainment? Mr. Johnson will answer those and other questions.”

In the same theme, the Chronicle also has an article on Educators Get New Spot for Second Life Initiation.

“Realizing that Orientation Island doesn’t fit the needs of many educators, the New Media Consortium, a higher-education technology group, has unveiled its own orientation island for newbies. The place has a San Francisco ambiance, in homage to Linden Lab’s headquarters: An open-air market, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a trolley car are among the sights. Kinks remain to be worked out. But the island is more colorful and informative than Linden Lab’s version. Particularly helpful is the “Pier of Culture,” which discusses, among other things, griefers (disruptive avatars), machinima (video production in Second Life), and poseballs (objects that animate avatars who sit on them). Such wisdom usually takes many months for users to discover on their own.”

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Introduction to Second Life, 1:00pm 10/16, ECS 023 @umbc

Join Gale Zasada (aka Gamay Nouvelle) at 1:00pm Tuesday, October 16, 2007 in ECS 023 for an introduction to Second Life, including a virtual tour of Info Island and the rest of the islands that make up the library and education archipelago. In her “First Life,” Gale Zasada is currently an instructor for the Library Associate Training Institute in Maryland, where she teaches search engine skills and Web 2.0 technologies.

Seats are limited, so register to ensure a place.

This workshop is jointly sponsored by the Library, Faculty Development Center and Office of Information technology.

Posted in Events, Second life, social media | 1 Comment »

Brain-Computer interface for Second Life

Researchers at the Tomita and Ushida Laboratory of Keio University in Japan have developed a brain-computer interface that allows a person to control a Second Life avatar just by thinking.

“The system consists of a headpiece equipped with electrodes that monitor activity in three areas of the motor cortex (the region of the brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). An EEG machine reads and graphs the data and relays it to the BCI, where a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle.” (link)

The range of functions supported is still limited, but are planning to support more complex movements and geatures.

The motivation is not to make your couch potato’s life even easier, but to develop the technology to “help people with serious physical impairments communicate and do business in Second Life.”

Here’s a video demonstrating mind control of a Second Life avatar.

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UMBC dissertation proposal: Rendering Massive Models

UMBC PhD student Mark Bolstad is presenting his dissertation proposal on Rendering Massive Models at 9:00am Monday, October 15th in room ITE 352. If you are interested in computer graphics and what a dissertation in the area is like, you might attend. In general, thesis and dissertation proposals and defenses are open to the public and attending some is a great way to learn about an important aspect of graduate study. Here is the dissertation abstract.

Whether it is for the quest of increased visual realism in cinema, or in the processing of the latest scientific data sets, the sizes of models being rendered are becoming larger. As this trend continues, the number of elements within a scene or a single object will exceed four billion, thus requiring 64-bit data structures to reference the components of the object, and consequently, new techniques and algorithms to efficiently renderer the object.

This dissertation will present a system that will have the ability to render models of extreme complexity. The system will be designed to generate photo-realistic images of complex scenes, but is not strictly limited to those types of images. The system will support procedural shading, global illumination, and scene geometry that exceeds four billion primitives, whether it is in a single complex objects, or in a scene with a large number of simple primitives. Some of the unique contributions in this proposal are:

• Rendering models of extreme complexity: This will be the first rendering system that will be capable of rendering scenes with geometric complexity exceeding four billion elements.
• Stochastic algorithms for geometry processing: A unique stochastic algorithm is proposed that reduces the total amount of geometry processed by the renderer with little to no impact on the visual quality.
• Acceleration structures for improving the performance when rendering scenes of extreme complexity: Many of the acceleration structures used for rendering do not scale well with large models. This dissertation proposes modifications to existing acceleration structures to not only increase their efficiency with respect to large models, but to also identify the best candidate for use with a scan-line algorithm.

Dissertation committee:

• Dr. Marc Olano (chair)
• Dr. Penny Rheingans
• Dr. Hillol Kargupta
• Dr. Charles Nicholas
• Dr. Howard Motteler

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Halting State: a thriller set in the MMORPG industry

Halting State is a new science fiction novel by Hugo-award winner Charles Stross that the author describes as a “a near-future thriller of skullduggery and rules lawyering in the shadowy world of massively multiplayer virtual reality games”.

“In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates, a dot-com startup company that’s just been floated on the London stock exchange. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But she soon realizes that the virtual world may have a devastating effect in the real one-and that someone is about to launch an attack upon both…” (link)

If you are intrigued, you can read the first prolog and the three chapters (1, 2, 3) posted on Charlie Stoss’s blog.

Great title, by the way. Amazingly, when I googled for ‘halting state’, all but two of the top 50 results were about the book. So much for automata theory.

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