Football Superstars is the world’s first Virtual Football World. An entire online virtual world designed by football fans exclusively for football fans, where you can enjoy a massively multiplayer experience on your PC.
A service that I have been keeping an eye on because of it’s skill in combining passionate sporting fan behaviour with sticky gaming [...]
AFTRS is running two new cool Graduate Diploma courses starting in Feb 2009 in Virtual Worlds and Games Design and we have had a few open days at the new building at the Fox Entertainment Quarter to excite and inform. For the last one we did a fun, little experiment and composited (green screened) visitors [...]
I introduced Indigo Prophesy (aka Farenheit) to AFTRS a couple of years ago when we ran some LAMP workshops as well as cross-media design courses and it opened the minds of a few writers and directors here to the potential of highly emotional story and character driven game design. A couple of those staff and [...]
I have the DVDs of this wonderful combination of music, Computer Graphics and imagination. It is great to see these popping up over Social Video sites as they are a fascinating example of how taking two often disparate ideas can be combined to make something much more than the sum of its parts. You can [...]
The 1968 cult classic, Night of the Living Dead is being remade or “reanimated” in a first for the film industry.
Mike Schneider one of the project coordinaters and lead animator explains:
“Night of the Living Dead Reanimated is a mass collaborative re-envisioning in which artists from around the world select scenes from the original 1968 film [...]
At AFTRS LAMP we are very interested in Artificial Intelligence as the foundation of NPC or non player charaters. Once you have a good generative scripted character they can interact with ‘participants’ in cinematic games or virtual worlds and drive narrative by having real conversations. So students can also develop AI to automatically create emotional [...]
A hat tip to Dan Taylor over at BBC for pointing out this lovely little viral that allows you the passive, sit-on-the-couch-and-munch-crisps viewer (well fiddle with laptop) to be the star of Spooks. FaceSpook is a personalized video tool where your face is mapped onto a character in an action scene - and all via [...]
Its been a long time coming but finally the new Second Life client 1.20 has a new advanced feature hidden in its client/debug menus (advanced/character/enable lip sync) - the ability for the mouth to move roughly in time with the live voice passing through the avatar. Combine this with the already included gestures and you [...]
As LAMP were presenting in mid 07 during various machinima and virtual world seminars the film ” Molotov Alva” has finally been transmitted on a national cable network, HBO in the US yesterday. Click here to go to HBO site to see a preview (for a week or so) and here is the official web [...]
While we are in the ‘realistic’ CG mood here is a video by 1st Ave Machine from February 2007 which has generated nearly 300 000 views on YouTube for a very creepy selection of out-of-this-world plant life. It works as it seems to be handheld camera work and not particularly professionally framed, I think. What [...]
Just spotted at GDC08 this incredible system for bringing very realistic facial animation into games engines and social virtual worlds. It is called MOVA and uses spaced multiple cameras versus motion sensors to map a face actor in real time using a total of 100 000 polygons. But enough about the tech, the proof is [...]
