Faculty of Science and Technology

Will Bamford presenting Tiltracer at the Nokia final in Budapest.

InfoLab21 mobile developers Will Bamford and Tamas Vajk, have won the European Final of the Nokia 2007 Mobile Innovation Competition.

The prizes were awarded at the Forum Nokia Tech Days held in Budapest, Hungary, on June 6-8.

Will, a PhD student and Tamas, who has come to Lancaster from Budapest University on a four month scholarship, previously won the UK leg of the competition and went on to compete with mobile developers from Finland, Denmark and Hungary. The finalsist had beaten 80 teams across Europe to get to the last stage.

The winning application was TiltRacer which used the built-in 3D motion sensor of the Nokia 5500 Sport phone to create a motion controller for games similar to Nintendo's Wii. The two students created a small car-racing game to play with the motion-detecting Nokia 5500 phone. The game was developed with the C++ programming language and using the XNA framework, which means the game could later be played on an Xbox system.

The jury cited this application for its simplicity, adding that TiltRacer points to great opportunity for the mobile industry's future.

Co-developer Bamford said it was fun and engaging to spend time and effort on this project. And Vajk added that the two are also working on other interesting projects, which can be viewed on the Mobile Radicals site, see also YouTube.

Forum Nokia Champion Dr. Reuben Edwards from the Department of Communication said, "It is not only great to have won but also that this has been a collaboration between the UK and Hungary and has been a good chance to for students from two European Universities to work together".

Mon 09 July 2007

Associated Links

• 2007 Nokia Innovation Competition
• Mobile Radicals - a freeform collection of dedicated mobile researchers based principally within the Informatics Group at Lancaster University's Department of Communication Systems
• Tiltracer Demo on Youtube