A brief look back upon the University of Huddersfield school of Computing and Engineering laid on for its prospecting postgraduates.

On Monday, my university began its two-week program of research events,which may be tracked on Twitter this year. A general conference is to be held this Saturday, outlining research strategies across the campus, but today was my school’s individual showcase day. Those who know me know that I’m looking upon postgraduate study with serious intent, and so I jumped at the chance to see what my lecturers and those already in postgrad. study are up to.

One of my biggest concerns was finding a programme which would allow me chance to further explore online gaming and social environment design, by looking more closely at the tricks and techniques put into drawing certain experiences out from their users. Thanks to Dr. Martyn Prigmore, I actually found this. His talk, entitled Engaging Users with Multimedia, set out research which is currently being undertaken into cognitive load, and how virtual worlds and other digital media are feeding into our ‘working memory’.

The way we communicate via internet media has become second nature to us, in much the same way as the acquisition of language might, however I do confess a certain interest in writing for this sort of outreach to a user. I believe that game logic falls into this category – the teaching of common rulesets within a game which allow a player to explore without being consciously aware of rules such as reincarnation and the effective use of fire spells upon a snow-dwelling enemy. My dissertation is currently exploring that phenomenon, in an attempt to use game logic teaching methods to teach users about a non-gaming environment.

An amusing lecture, also from the department of informatics, was delivered by Games Programming lecturer Dr. Zhijie Xu, in which he walked us through some practical use of 3D pattern recognition technology. It didn’t appear particularly relevant to my interests, although the same hardware is apparently being put to use in augmented reality experiments within the department. Still, he told an amusing story about photographs depicting the supposed appearance of a rare Chinese pygmy tiger in Shaanxi province. Doubts about their authenticity led to the usual scans for digital doctoring, however researchers also turned to creating a 3D model of the scene, comprised from the 71 photos its finder took. This was to see if objects within the scene were of a reasonable enough scale. It actually emerged that the 3D model could only generate a flat image of the tiger, at a maximum of 10cm thick with margin for error. Why? The spotter had photographed a carboard cutout.

As I heard from another lecturer, Graham Watts (also my dissertation supervisor), this technology is being put to use in barcode recognition and 3D viewers. Laptops, configured with webcam-enabled software can be used to simulate a 3D environment upon a given surface, almost like viewing a hologram with the laptop monitor as the medium. This has already been seen on The Eye of Judgement, of course, and although many applications I’ve seen since appear to be utterly useless, I still hold some hope that such augmentation can be good to real and good use with interactions in future.

Amusingly, he mused that this might even be a fun tool at gaming conventions. Imagine if your attendance badge carried a barcode on it, and all attendees sent details of their 3D avatar on to the organisers before they arrived. With the right viewer, complete strangers in the physical world could be reunited with virtual friends, in their own virtual skin too. Could there possibly be a better way for geeks to spot each other? Frankly, I’d be happy just to see this put to use in rendering somebody’s name atop their heads, Second Life style. That’d make networking a real walk in the park.

In a nice segue, this brings me to the final lecture I attended, from Dr. John Bonner. Called Technology and Happiness, his was a discussion of how happiness can be factored into design, and why we should avoid superfluous dead-enders such as weather reports from refridgerators or marginal upgrades to iPhones. I feel that there’s less grounds for research here, because of course there have bee centuries of study into what human happiness is. Applying technology to our models of satisfaction is a relatively simple affair. Still, it makes for a fascinating debate, and it is something I feel I wish to keep tabs on in my own work. Heaven forbid I bow to hypocrisy and some day create an app. just to remind people that they need to breathe.