My post are usually few and far between however so this new post should indicate how passionate I am about this….

The new Apple iPad. Yes I seriously want one and if I can preorder the 3G before April I will.  The functionality this little wonder brings is nothing short of brilliant.  And might I add obvious (to Startrek fans) and way way over due.

Startrek Data Pads

Apple's iPad

Specific details of the sleek beauty can be found here.

What this device means for games and education is very exciting.  I can envisage a whole new set of applications which take advantage of the natural touch interface, networking capabilities and movement detection functions.  In education we could easily see a return to the days of the chalk and slate, but now a slate with memory and connectivity.  Just brilliant the opportunities here.

But….

Through some level of what I can only imagine is a lack of foresight, the iPad does not have a camera.  Unlike the iPhone and iPod, this bigger brother is missing one of the most important components that we find in practically every mobile device.

Sometime ago I found these excellent augmented reality concept photos by Mac Funamizu.

Is this not essentially a see through iPad? Although the technology isn’t quite there to give us such a lucid augmented reality experience, the simple act of adding a CAMERA to the back side of the iPad would go a long way to making these concepts real.

The combination of the iPad interface, its giro-scope, accelerator, compass and GPS makes it ideal for a mobile, augmented window frame with which to experience on-demand, live, location-based, meta data and social content superimposed in real time onto the scene being viewed.

If the iPhone can handle some promising augmented reality applications, so too can the iPad.

It just needs a camera!!

Ben Sawyer and Peter Smith from the Serious Games Initiative very kindly created a Serious Games Taxonomy sometime ago.  This semester I used this taxonomy as the basis for my serious games course assessment.  Students have had to define various parts of the taxonomy and find and compare serious games within the different taxonomy categories.

If you’d like to take a look, head on over to games.aliveed.com.

Recently I used FLARToolkit to create some online Augmented Reality to go with the NHTV brochures. Watch this video to see how it works and where you can download a brochure to try it out.

I have to give a short presentation for the Royal Commissioner of The Netherlands.  I’ve made this short video to show them examples of new and upcoming gaming technologies, some examples from my 2008 students and research ideas I’ve been working on.

Though I would share it with everyone here.

Enjoy.

On the 5th of June I gave my first official public lecture as the Associate Professor of Serious Games at the Academy for Digital Entertainment. The topic was on the use of Augmented Learning; using augmented reality (AR) in teaching and learning situations.

The transcript of my lecture can be found here.

And here is a short video of an implementation of AR I’m working on involving the integration of live video feed and a multiplayer online gaming environment.

ItzaBitza is an excellent educational game developed to inspire children (4+) creativity.  It was released in 2008 by a Microsoft spin off company.  The application uses clever drawing recognition algorithms called “Living Ink” to determine what a child is drawing on the screen and then animates and has the on screen characters (called Sketchies) interact with it.

It all happens in 2D on a very colourful background.

I downloaded the demo yesterday and played it with my 5 year old daughter.  At first she was a little apprehensive to explore and get things wrong.  When asked by Sketchy to draw a house she quickly handed the mouse over to Mummy.  Eventually she had enough courage to try some drawing and also quickly found the eraser button to get rid of drawings she thought were wrong or didn’t look right.  I tried to tell her that it didn’t matter whay they looked like – but she was insistent.

Eventually I went into the other room after she seem confident with the interface and I wasn’t called back into the room every other second to explain something.  I found she was much more explorative without me there.  I watched from a distance as she was able to interpret what the Sketchy wanted her to draw using the mouse over words text to speech feature.

Just when I thought games were stiffeling imagination I found this game.  I’d certainly recommend it for any parent.  It has all the classic elements of gameplay and good learning pedagogy.

Worth a look.  You might even get hooked yourself.

Over the past five or so years I have spent a great deal of time and energy developing Serious Games with 3D game engines and a variety of tools such as Maya and Studio Max.  The first difficulty my team encountered with this approach was the incompatibility of tools and as a result the cross platform-ness of the games.  Furthermore we has difficulties with the poor computer specs in universities and school computer labs.  Games wouldn’t run because of slow networks or basically non-existent graphics cards.

Now I previously held the believe that if I pursued my cause to bring high quality 3D Serious Games to “all”  that eventually home computers and school computer labs would be up to spec.  However I’m not sure that this will ever be the case.  The first laptop I had in my new job which had an integrated graphics chip and was supposed to run 3D games was challenged by many applications.  Applications move forward developed on better and better machines and school and home users may never catch up.

I’ve just read another part of Klopfer’s “Augmented Learning” book.  In it he tells the story of a regular school class in the US trying to get some quality time in a school computing lab.  After reading his account of locked lab rooms, lost passwords, long profile loading times, absence of lab techs and missing software I realised my experiences in Australia were nothing out of the ordinary.  In one class I remember students having to wait 15 minutes for their profiles to load before they could do any work… and watch out if they tried to load the Microsoft Development Support library.  The solution to this problem, I was told, was to get the students to come to class 15 minutes early to log in !!

At my current university students are required to have laptop computers.  This solves a lot of the before mentioned problems, however in most schools and universities it is not practical or fair to insist students have their own machines.

Instead of battling a situation that may never change, Klopfer’s research team has the most innovative idea towards achieving a critical mass for games in the classroom: using mobile devices and bring the games to the students.  Even more than that, the games are quite elementary with respect to graphics and audio when compared to the latest block buster video games, but their educational value is far superiour.

This brings be to the first value of “Augmented Learning”: using technology to improve student experiences in the classroom by facilitating authentic and immersive learning experiences.  Students and teachers get to stay in their familiar educational surroundings and not forced to mould to the technology.  Educational practice dictates how technology is used and not the technology dictating how education will work.

I’ve been reading Eric Klopfer’s new book “Augmented Learning”.  Its about the use of mobile games in the classroom with the goal of imparting soft skills such as sustained reasoning, collaboration, anticipating change and abstract thinking about information technology.  I’m up to chapter three and so far it is very interesting albeit currently strongly focussed on the U.S. approach to education and educational policy.

What I found … interesting .. or maybe at times frustrating … was the need to defend the word “game” as a blacklisted activity in the classroom.  Apparently schools, some teachers and parents in the USA immediately consider “game” to translate into “ultra violent computer/video game”.  However, games have been used in the classroom for as long as there have been classrooms.  Before computers there were board, card, dice and other forms of games used in the classroom to engage students.

I found the need for Klopfer to define and defend the word “game” quite a drawn out section of chapter one and chapter two.  Though it is obvious from reading this that his research team has had quite a battle getting computer games accepted in the classroom as a viable teaching medium.

I began this post with the intention of giving my own definition of game.  But I’m not sure that is particularly important.  Whether we call them games, simulations, explorations or virtual environments, ultimately our goal is to engage students and provide them with educational opportunities beyond the traditional classroom.  How the term “game” is perceived is just symmantics.  We could debate its definition until we are blue in the face. What matters is how we are using information technology to enhance the teaching and learning experience.  What you call it …. well “Augmented Learning” is a start.

Here is a serious of YouTube Tutorials I have created on the world editing functions in Cube 2.  In my opinion this game engine is an excellent cross platform application with client and server side coding.  The multiuser in game world editing features are quite unique.

This tutorial explains the basics for the creation of a serious game. It uses the DXStudio game engine.