Visionday: Games, Middleware and Simulations.
My purple poster and I went to the Visiondays seminar today and it was a rather interesting morning, where I got to hear presentations from The Three Serious Danish Game Developers: IO Interactive, ITE and Deadline. Both ITE and Deadline talked about using middleware (or parts of middleware) for their game developments and even if the focus here was on graphics middleware, it gave some interesting insights into the middleware products and the processes of using middleware in game production. Thomas Jacobsen of IO Interactive talked about physically-based simulations and even if I couldn't understand the algorithms, I could see it was cool :). It was interesting also, that he emphasised that as game producers you dont have to go for complete physical realism, but just for believability (Henry James, hear that?), i.e. if a character gets shot, the animation of the body being hit by the bullet must look somewhat natural, but it doesn't have to be an absolute simulation of "real death" (rather the opposite, I would actually surmise, if people being shot by Hitman died a too natural death, it would be too gory). Following in the morning break, I talked to a senior researcher at FORCE Technology which is a private institute which specialises in maritime simulations and have an awesome "sea simulator" where you can actually have cano races (or so I have been told by a friend who works there). Anyway, he pointed out at FORCE all their simulations of physic behaviours (water, wind, currents) needs to be minutely realistic in order not to enforce "negative learning" situations, where people learn something in the simulator, which they would never be able to do in real life..(go the website and check out the point "Realism" under Maritime Products and you will get the full explanation...).But apart from that, he didn't see the simulations they did as something completely incompatible with game simulations and I later learned at lunch that he was an eager PS2 player. Wonder what kind of games you could come up with, if you had that kind of simulator at hand?

Lunch also provided me with the opportunity to listen in on a discussion of how it is to be a game developing compagny in Denmark and I learnt a little more aboutwhat kind of abilities and skills, Danish game developers are actually looking for in future employees. So in all in all, not a bad day, despite the fact that I didn't understanding approx 90% of the papers given. I really should take a course in algoritmic reading one day soon...well, *grin*, on the other hand, when you are the ONLY female researcher present in an all male conference, it is much easier to get people to talk to you, the value of that shouldn't be underestimated either.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:04