Recent Stories
- Unborn babies 'practise' facial expressions in the womb
- Lancaster leads the way in cyber security bursary scheme
- Physicists gain insight into the UK's biggest killer
- Engineering students make finals of national start-up business competition
- Social media plagued by privacy problems, say researchers
- Lancaster Environment Centre conducts roadside pollution research for BBC
- Lancaster set to receive funding boost to stimulate UK's economy
- Billion-year-old water could hold clues to life on Earth and Mars
- How do we find out about cyber criminals?
- First, carbon footprints... now you can calculate your 'nitrogen footprint'
Hollywood Award For InfoLab21 Inventors
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Players taking part in a test run of Pac-Lan
Two Lancaster University students who helped invent a pioneering mobile phone game have been invited to Hollywood to receive an award at the American Film Institute.
PhD students Will Bamford and Omer Rashid have been awarded the Computers in Entertainment Scholarship Prize 2006 from the US-based ACM which is one of the world's premier computer societies.
They will each receive up to $5,000 and the choice of an internship at either the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore or its offshoot, the Hollywood Lab in Los Angeles, which researches digital media technology in collaboration with Hollywood studios and entertainment companies.
Omer said: "It's totally unexpected and I'm looking forward to working at the cutting edge of digital media and establishing international connections."
Their invention is the first game in the world to use mobile phones equipped with Radio Frequency Identification Tags. RFID tags are small devices - like barcodes - which can transmit and receive data. It is estimated that over half of mobile phones will be equipped with RFID by 2009.
Will said: "RFID is already being used in some countries to pay for tickets with your phone which has a tag inside, or to add up your shopping as you go around so you don't have to empty the trolley.It's going to be huge and this was the first game in the world to use phones with RFID for mixed reality gaming."
Called Pac-Lan - in homage to the early computer game Pacman - the game can be played by up to five players on mobile phones.They keep track of one another's position through images on their mobile phones as they chase each another around.
Players have to collect points from a series of RFID tags attached to discs on lamp posts. When a player collects their points by holding their mobile phone against the disc, the virtual reality maze on each phone is updated with the player's position.Each player shows up as an animated character - Pac-Lan or Ghost - moving round the screen. This enables a team of Ghosts to track the player down and catch them.
Also sharing in the prize are Dr Paul Coulton and Dr Reuben Edwards from Lancaster University's Department of Communications Systems, based at InfoLab21, along with Jurgen Scheible of the University of Art and Design in Finland.
Dr Coulton said: "There's a change in the delivery of entertainment with the development of a DIY culture with blogs, mash-ups and sites like MySpace and there is considerable interest in new entertainment genres such as highlighted by Pac-Lan.
http://www.acm.org/pubs/cie.html
http://www.afi.com/default.aspx
http://www.mixedrealitylab.org/
Wed 27 September 2006
Latest News
Unborn babies 'practise' facial expressions in the womb
Researchers from Durham and Lancaster Universities suggest that a foetus's ability to show a "pain" facial expression is a developmental process which could potentially give doctors another index of the health of a foetus.
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Mon 17 June 2013
Lancaster leads the way in cyber security bursary scheme
Lancaster is one of four UK universities selected to take part in an 'industry first' sponsorship initiative encouraging students to take up Masters-level cyber security degrees.
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Mon 10 June 2013
Physicists gain insight into the UK's biggest killer
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the UK, accounting for a third of all fatalities through illnesses such as stroke and heart disease.
Story supplied by LU Press Office
Wed 29 May 2013
Engineering students make finals of national start-up business competition
Engineering students Scott Nash, Daniel Richardson and Aaron Aboshio have won the northern heat of the Youth Entrepreneurs Scheme 'Engineering YES' competition for their spin-out renewable energy company Atlantis.
Thu 23 May 2013