Written by Philip Wilson-Smith.
Two University of Lincoln graduates have had their research accepted in to the 2013 ACE conference.
The 10th international Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) is a world leading conference, where academics who specialise in a wide range of fields come together to discuss and present new ideas and research.
Games computing graduates Sean Oxspring and Nick Bull have both had their academic research papers submitted to the conference.
Sean said: “It’s interesting to be on the forefront of games research because games research is really new. It’s also really hard to get anything published or credible in the games research field.”
“I didn’t expect it to actually get into the conference.”
Sean’s paper focused on crowd variation and making them seem more realistic and believable within large open world games.
He said: “When simulating realistic crowds in virtual environments it is often hard to make characters look and behave completely differently to each other. My project aimed to increase visual diversity by exploring techniques in which crowd generation algorithms can be adjusted to better support greater variety and create a more believable and engaging play environment.”
“His involved creating a ‘clone spotting’ activity and producing an adjustable solution, such as altering the character’s height or movement.”
Nick’s paper focused on our interactions within the real world and smart phone games.
Nick said:“I concentrated on mixed-reality games, which means the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects interact in real time.”
“The idea is that actions carried out in reality will have an impact on the game. I looked at whether I could create a game in which the rules are not compatible with the rules of the real environment.”
His last game “Shhh!” challenged android phone users to see how much noise they could get away with making in libraries without being told off.
Dennis Reidsma, program chair and main organiser of ACE 2013 said:
“The conference began 10 years ago as a workshop on computer entertainment, because some people thought that entertainment was not taken seriously enough as research topic.”
The conference’s theme this year was “Making New Knowledge”, inspired by the idea that making games and toys is more fun than playing them.
ACE 2013 was held in the Netherlands on November 14 2013 at the University of Twente.