Justin Lyon

Fail Safely: Gaming Technology, connected to real world data is now used by businesses and governments to help plan our future

Jed Ashforth

Title to be confirmed

Jonathan Read

Virtual Battlespace - From Computer Game to Simulation

Itamar Lesuisse

When science meets games

Mark Craig

Developing a small game on wide range of modern platforms.

Bjoern Schuller

Grasping Players' Emotions: A Serious Game?

Steve Benford

Pervasive Games

Chris Doran

Game Theory: Founding, growing and selling a technology company in the games industry.

Justin Lyon
Simudyne

Fail Safely: Gaming Technology, connected to real world data is now used by businesses and governments to help plan our future.

Big data is often big noise with little insights offered other than patterns or loose correlation. We all know correlation is rarely causation for the future, however leaders in both the private and public sectors have too often relied on these available tools and their own experience and gut feel. Get it wrong, and there is no re-set button.

Cognition platforms available today solve this by exploiting advanced mathematics (the physics of reality) and the real data (big, little, even fuzzy) embedded in immersive visualizations (including hi-def 3D) to allow leaders to Simulate and scenario plan decisions and actions in a virtual world in order to select the best of all possible futures, avoid unintended consequences, and "fail safely" and hit reset when decisions produce bad outcomes in the simulation.

Come hear how advances in computer science and 3d worlds (that used to only exist in supercomputers) are delivering cognition platforms in the cloud and in the browser today.

Bio: Justin Lyon is the CEO and founder of simulation tech company, Simudyne.

Justin is an expert in simulation science, web development, cloud computing, interactive marketing and starting up and successfully exiting businesses. Justin has worked in web development and hosting for over 20 years and sold his first company aged 26.

Global companies around the world are already making use of advance simulation technology and Justin is one of the world’s pioneers in the business, helping governments, businesses and academics foresee the future using simulated realities to make well-informed decisions for the benefit of all. Simudyne enables people to test out scenarios using simulation technology and mathematical reason – in order to see the impact that key decisions will have. www.simudyne.com

Jed Ashforth
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

An introduction to Virtual Reality with Project Morpheus

• Project Morpheus - What does it allow me to do?
• How is presence achieved?
• A new frontier in Game Design
• An overview of VR Best Practices
• Interesting, fun opportunities for creative pioneers!

Jonathan Read
Bohemia Interactive Simulations

Virtual Battlespace - From Computer Game to Simulation

VBS is PC-based simulation software that has its origins in the first-person battlefield simulator game Operation Flashpoint released in 2001 by Bohemia Interactive Studio. In continuous development since 2002 and now with large scale terrain and the latest graphics, it is used across the globe for individual and team training and experimentation in air, land and sea scenarios. .

This talk will describe the evolution of VBS and discuss how the system has been shaped by the users themselves. Planned future developments will be covered, along with the challenges and opportunities that Bohemia faces in delivering a market-leading product in a competitive but growing market.

Bio: Jonathan Read served for 20 years in the Royal Navy as a Submarine Warfare and Weapon Engineering Officer. Whilst in the Royal Navy he completed a Masters Degree in Defence Simulation and Modelling at the Royal Military College of Science and spent two years developing MOD policy for the use of simulation in the defence equipment acquisition process. Since leaving the Royal Navy Jonathan has specialised in the development and application of simulation in systems engineering and training. He has worked for QinetiQ in the UK and Boeing in India and the UK in this field and has hands-on experience with VBS over the course of many years in a range of engineering and training programmes.

Jonathan joined Bohemia Interactive as Head of the UK Office in August 2013 where he combines his military and industry experience to deliver the best virtual training solution to customers in the UK and around the globe.

Itamar Lesuisse
Peak/brainbow

When science meets games

Games can bring benefits beyond entertainment. At Peak, Neuroscientists work hand in hand with Game Designers and Engineers to create a new generation of games with benefits.

Bio:Itamar Lesuisse is the CEO of Peak/brainbow, a new generation of mobile self-improvement and a brain training platform. Prior to Peak, Itamar founded a location-based mobile service, worked as a product manager at Amazon and Visa and as a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group.

Mark Craig
Lucid Games

Developing a small game on wide range of modern platforms.

If a games developer wishes to develop their game on the large range of games platforms, a number of engineering challenges exist. Currently tasked with developing a game for 9 platforms, I will cover the various challenges we encountered and the techniques we used to overcome these challenges.

Bio: Mark Craig has been a professional games developer for nearly 18 years. After working for Bizarre Creations as a Lead Programmer for 15 years and following its closure, Mark founded Lucid Games with a number of senior ex-members of Bizarre Creations. In its 3 years Lucid Games have developed a number of games for both the mobile and handheld games markets.

Bjoern Schuller
Imperial College London

Grasping Players' Emotions: A Serious Game?

Digital Games are loaded with emotion - in fact, many are "all about emotion". However, only few of today,s game engines actually measure players' affect. This talk focuses on if and how this can potentially be changed in the near future by introducing latest advancement in this field such as autonomous adaptation, confidence measures and distribution as well as benchmark results and an exemplary application in the ASC-Inclusion serious game platform. Beyond emotion, rich automatic player classification including personality traits and physiological and mental state and social behaviour are touched upon.

Bio: Bjoern W. Schuller is a Senior Lecturer in Imperial College London's Department of Computing. He further heads the Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing Group at TUM/Germany where he obtained his doctoral and pre- and post-doctoral degrees. He is also the founding CEO of audEERING UG (limited). Previous major stays of his include the French CNRS near Paris/France, Joanneum Research in Graz/Austria and the University of Passau/Germany as well as permanent Visiting Professorship/Association with HIT/China and the University of Geneva/Switzerland. His work (>400 publications, >6000 citations, h-index = 39) focuses on Machine Learning for Affective Computing. At present, he mainly coordinates the European ASC-Inclusion Project aiming to teach children on the autism spectrum about emotion by serious digital gaming and is a PI/partner in ERC Starting/Advanced Grants on emotion and computing ("iHEARu" and "PROPEREMO"). Dr. Schuller is the current president of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) and was co-founding member and secretary of the steering committee and guest editor, and still serves as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and several further IEEE and Elsevier journals, is a general chair of ACM ICMI 2014, and was a program chair of ACM ICMI 2013, IEEE SocialCom 2012, and ACII 2011 as well as initiator and main organiser of 11 international research challenges and workshops centred on recognising human affect and personality (the ComParE series at Interspeech, the AVEC series and MAPTRAITS at ACM Multimedia, ACII, and ICMI). He further organised two workshops focussed on serious gaming at FDG 2013 and ACM IUI 2014.

Steve Benford
Mixed reality Lab, University of Nottingham

Pervasive Games

Pervasive games extend the gaming experience out into the real world-be it on city streets, in the remote wilderness, or a living room. Players with mobile computing devices move through the world. Sensors capture information about their current context, including their location, and this is used to deliver a gaming experience that changes according to where they are, what they are doing, and even how they are feeling. The game player becomes unchained from the console and experiences a game that is interwoven with the real world and is potentially available at any place and any time. My talk will draw on a series of ground-breaking pervasive games developed by UK artists such as Blast Theory, Brendan Walker and Active Ingredient, in collaboration with the Mixed reality Lab, to illustrate the opportunities and challenges of designing pervasive games. I will focus in particular on how to deliberately - and ethically - employ various forms of discomfort to create thrilling pervasive game experiences that spill out into public settings.

Bio: Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing in the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. He currently holds an EPSRC Dream Fellowship and is the Director of the EPSRC-funded Horizon Doctoral Training Centre in Ubiquitous Computing. He is also a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge and was the first Visiting Professor at the BBC in 2012. Academically, Steve has received best paper awards at the ACM's annual Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in 2005, 2009, 2011 and2012 (with honorable mentions in 2006 and 2013). He also won the 2003 Prix Ars Elctronica for Interactive Art, the 2007 Nokia Mindtrek award for Innovative Applications of Ubiquitous Computing, and has received four BAFTA nominations. He was elected to the CHI Academy in 2012. His book Performing Mixed Reality was published by MIT Press in 2011.

Chris Doran
Geomerics

Game Theory: Founding, growing and selling a technology company in the games industry.

Geomerics was founded in 2005 as a spin-out from Cambridge University, and was acquired by ARM in late 2013. Academic Founder Dr Chris Doran was there from start to finish, and in this talk he describes the journey, highlighting the mistakes and pitfalls for academics interested in commercialising their own research.

Bio: Dr Chris Doran is an entrepreneur and Director of Geomerics, an ARM company. He founded Geomerics and took then from start-up through to product launch and growth, and ultimately to exit. Prior to founding Geomerics Chris was a research scientist with over 15 years experience. He is a regular speaker at major international conferences and is a Director of Studies for Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.