RENCI at UNC-Chapel Hill: Serious Gaming and Simulation, Unity 3D Platform

VIDEO
Running the Unity 3D Game Engine in a Global Immersion 4-Projector Dome System at the RENCI@UNC Engagement Center



For more information:
Serious Gaming and Simulation at RENCI@UNC

"The application of game technology to teaching, training, and research has been a topic of interest at RENCI@UNC. More specifically, the adaptation of game engines and 3D environments to the specialized visualization environments at the engagement center is a promising area for experimentation and collaboration...We very recently obtained copies of Unity, and have been working through some of the basics. One of the first activities was to create specialized code to show Unity-built 3D environments in our Global Immersion dome system. This was successfully accomplished with a good bit of code-hacking to render the proper camera views and viewports for the four channel dome system. There are some known issues with the Windows stand-alone viewer that we were able to work around. We did some imaginative manipulation of the Unity Plug-in using a browser embedded within a WPF application that allows arbitrary screen resolutions, as well as spanning across multiple displays. Look for a post later with some technical details."
FYI
Here are some pictures from RENCI:

Ball's Plight, an iPhone and iPod Touch Game App by PriPri Games (plug for a former classmate) -and more games-related info....

Priyesh Dixit, a game developer has a free game app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. "Ball's Plight", can be downloaded from the iTunes Store. Here is the description:

"You are Ball, an alien with telekinetic powers and no limbs. An evil scientist has captured you and is forcing you to play his little game so he can unlock the secrets of your powers. You must survive in order to escape!"

"At its core, Ball's Plight is a classic game of ball and paddle. Touch the ball to the paddle to increase your score, reach the goal score to advance to the next level while earning points."


Priyesh was one of my classmates in Dr. Michael Youngblood's Artificial Intelligence for Game Design Class at UNC-Charlotte during the fall of 2006. He went on to work with Dr. Youngblood and Hunter Hale, a Ph.D. student, on the Common Games Understanding and Learning Toolkit (CGUL).

The mission of the CGUL project:

"To identify, develop, collect, and integrate a suite of tools and techniques for improving the understanding of interaction and behavior in all FPS/3PS games, incorporating knowledge as game artifacts, and learning how to advance game artificial intelligence through these mechanisms." (CJUL downloads)

About Priyesh:

Priyesh is a programmer at TimeGate Studios in Surgar Land, TX. He has a MS in Computer Science with a certificate in Game Design and Development.

Priyesh twitters as "madgamer7", if you'd like to follow him.


RELATED:


The Playground: UNC-Charlotte's Game Design and Development Program


UNC-Charlotte's Game Intelligence Group, lead by Dr. Michael Youngblood




UNC-Charlotte's Game2Learn Group, lead by Dr. Tiffany Barnes

Publication:
D.Hunter Hale, G. Micheal Youngblood, & Priyesh N. Dixit Automatically-generated Convex Region Decomposition for Real-time Spatial Agent Navigation in Virtual Worlds (pdf) Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
(Voted Most Infuential Game AI Publication of 2008)

Game:
Incursion, an Xbox game created by UNC-Charlotte Game Lab students,is available for download from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace website.

Zune HD Preview via Gizmodo

Zune HD Video Hands On from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

I need to give this some thought....like the iPhone, the Zune has an accelerometer.

Multi-player multi-touch: "NuMTyPysics", based on Tim Edmond's Numpty Physics (similar to Crayon Physics)

I have Numpty Physics on my Nokia n800 internet tablet, and Crayon Physics on my HP TouchSmart PC. Both are designed for single touch, and are fun to play. Since my TouchSmart can handle duo-touch input, I wondered what Crayon Physics might be like if it supported two players at once.



As you can see from the video, Thomas Perl and his colleagues have figured this out- at least with Numpty Physics!



The music is worth the watch. It's by Triplexity.

Numpty Physics and Crayon Physics both use the Box2D engine. Here is some information from the website:

"NuMTyPYsics are our enhancements to Tim Edmond's NumptyPhysics game. We added support for receiving TUIO messages from tbeta via PyTUIO by embedding an Python interpreter into the NumptyPhysics code. Currently, we simply emulate mouse input by pushing hand-crafted input events (SDL_Event) onto the SDL event queue (SDL_PushEvent). In the future, we plan to do bi-directional communication between the game engine (written in C++) and our multi-touch handling code, which will be written in Python." -Thomas Perl

Note:
I've use Crayon Physics Deluxe with several of the students I work with who have severe autism. It is amazing how well they can figure out solutions for the levels. It would be even better if it could be enabled for duo-touch. It supports joint attention, which is a very important social interaction skill for young people with autism to develop.

My Nabaztag:tag and Mir:ror Arrived!

I'll update this post after I've played with my new Wi-Fi and RFID toys.

For more information:

violet: Let All Things Be Connected
"The Internet of Things starts here"

GestureTek's "Cube": A compact Interactive Gesture-based Display System

GestureTek's "Cube"




From the GestureTek website:

"Introducing The Cube - a compact, turnkey, 'plug and play' interactive display unit that brings the power of gesture control to a variety of display spaces. Project the interactive 80” diagonal display onto almost any floor, wall, table or counter for branding, advertising, entertainment and product promotion. The Cube will engage customers, turn heads and drive business results."

Brochure (pdf)