A few weeks ago a good friend of mine made the mistake to ask, ‘Which tablet should I buy?’ After two hours and a long rant, I think he regretted asking that question.
The reason? Until a few years ago buying a tablet was easy, few products really competed with the iPad. Now, however, the choice is much more difficult.
The tablet market is very varied with products ranging in price from a few hundred euro to €1000. So are the more expensive tablets always better?
The answer has to be a resounding ‘no’. And the choice is not limited to budget. You would also need to consider size, both physical and memory-wise, OS (Operating System), and manufacturer.
The right choice mostly depends on the intended use. As an e-book reader alternative, a light and portable 7 to 8 inch tablet seems ideal. Here Google’s Nexus 7 proves an excellent budget choice, with the iPad Mini a more expensive but stylish alternative.
Size does matter. If you intend to use your tablet to browse the internet or watch movies a 10 inch tablet is your best choice. Here the iPad Air still provides a powerful tablet with an excellent display in a lightweight package. Equally strong and stylish are the offering from other manufacturers such as the leather cladded Samsung Galaxy Note and the waterproof Sony Xperia Z2.
If you wish to replace your laptop with a tablet, now you can. Windows based tablets as the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 add a clever keyboard and a full Windows 8.1 experience to provide a real alternative to a laptop. Hybrids such as the Asus Transformer, a netbook with a detachable screen, and the Lenovo Yoga show that functionality does not need to be sacrificed when opting for a tablet.
TxK marks the return of seminal designer Jeff Minter whose career spans over 30 years. The recurring themes in Minter’s works are frenetic action and psychedelic experiences. All these abound in TxK—a new arcade shooter for PS Vita.
The game starts off with the player in a wireframe setting being attacked by what looks like an army of angry ribbons. Soon you will discover that you are actually an oddly shaped spider(ish) creature that is crawling at extremely high velocity. Once your attacking abilities have been mastered, the environment will constantly reshape around you. Before you know it, you will find yourself up-side down fighting enemies from every direction.
It is an exercise in minimalism; so much is achieved with few details. It is up to the player to make sense of the bizarre juxtapositions of graphics and sounds. Thanks to its unique style, TxK shines.
In ancient times games played an integral role in society. Whilst in today’s hyperlinked world, games have evolved into complex, sophisticated mechanisms that enthral millions. Now, however, games are dismissed as trivial, and of no real value. But is this really the case? Cassi Camilleri meets the research team gamED from the University of Malta to find out.
Picture a Maltese crowdfunding website dedicated specifically to locally based creatives. It would be supported and promoted by government entities to the Maltese public, based locally and abroad. For this to work the public sector plays a crucial role in promoting the site and educating the public on how crowdfunding works.
The site creates a platform for followers of local creatives to contribute towards performances and products made by artists they love. Unlike sites like Kickstarter, products that can be digitally distributed or ordered will remain on the site doubling as a digital distribution platform for locally made works.
Research in 3DTV has been active for the past decades. Its popularity is growing rapidly driven by market forces and new technologies that are bringing down costs enabling a more widespread distribution. Normal 3D video uses only one camera to generate two video streams for each eye. Multi-view video allows the viewer to choose which angle they want to watch (pictured).
Multi-view video needs to process huge amounts of data since it needs to transmit many different camera angles of the same scene. If the 3D videos are being streamed in real time, the processing power needs grow even further. To reduce computer processing the multi-view plus depth concept was introduced. Using this idea not all the alternative videos are used. Instead a few are selected and the angles in between are filled using sophisticated computer algorithms. The challenge with this approach is to generate high quality videos at different angles whilst keeping the amount of data transmitted as low as possible.
To attempt to overcome these problems, Maverick Hili (supervised by Dr Ing. Reuben Farrugia) analysed the current state-of-the-art video coding standard called H.264. The idea is to compress the amount of data which is transmitted without losing video quality. To achieve a better compression, the depth information in a video was represented with a few parameters. The receiver then has to use these parameters to reconstruct the original depth information. Hili managed to improve compression using this technique, an important step to be able to stream live 3D video into our homes.
This research was performed as part of Masters in Telecommunications within the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta. It was partially funded by the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship (Malta). This Scholarship is part-financed by the European Union —European Social Fund (ESF) under Operational Programme II—Cohesion Policy 2007–2013, “Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality Of Life”.
Solo board games are a funny business. First of all, nobody can catch you cheating. The temptation of closing an eye to a few little mistakes or ‘forgetting’ a rule are alluring. Second, you have nobody to rub the wrong way when you make a good move. Third, there’s nobody to beat. Board games initially strike us as a multi-player group affair, but solo games do exist. We have all played solitaire.
Onirim is a one-player card game. Although two people can play co-operatively I like it best solo. In Onirim you play as a ‘Dreamwalker’: a person stuck in a dream trying to find his way out before he is consumed by his own nightmares. To escape you must assemble a total of eight doors before the deck runs out. If it does you’re in trouble and stuck forever (till the next game).
By playing cards you move from room to room inside a labyrinth. When you manage to play three rooms of the same colour consecutively, a door of that colour ‘appears’, as in, you search for one inside the deck.
‘Hah, sounds easy!’ you might say. ‘Hah, you’re wrong’. There are nightmare cards, and nightmare cards are… horrible. You can only play one card per turn, and you might have a cunning plan set up cheerfully in your hand, but then a ‘nightmare’ happens, and you need to discard all your cards, and start over. Thankfully, the ‘nightmares’ can be dodged. Prophecies allow you to see the future, while keys negate a ‘nightmare’s’ effects.
I like Onirim. It is different, has gorgeous art, and is wonderfully balanced. The only downside is that it is out of print. But worry not, Dreamwalker! Onirim will be reprinted this year and you can get your dreamy paws on it… soon enough.
How do you help school children handle fights, bullying, and other conflict properly? You build a game, of course, and you let children take on different roles in a village. But how does that lead to resolving conflicts? Ashley Davis met researchers Prof.Rilla Khaled and Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis to find out more
Do you chuckle at the thought of a serious game? The phrase is an oxymoron. How can a game be serious? Games are meant to be fun, frivolous, a way to pass the time. Or else you sometimes hear that games are anything but frivolous. That video game violence in particular is a threat to social order. The idea that games can be used to advance human understanding about the world, and that they can help us to teach, train, or motivate people in some way, is something that still needs to enter our mentality.
Designing games to explore research questions and to solve real world problems is actually a very important aspect of games research, an area of applied research that now has a strong presence at the University of Malta with the establishment of the Institute of Digital Games. Researchers from the Institute work on European-funded projects to create games that tackle serious problems affecting children and adults alike.
Village Voices has been voted the best learning game in Europe at the 2013 Serious Game Awards
Prof. Rilla Khaled and Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis are two researchers now based at the Institute of Digital Games who work on serious game projects. Khaled’s work focuses on serious game design, while Yannakakis is a specialist in artificial intelligence and computational creativity. Computational creativity tries to build upon the latest technological innovations in human–computer interaction that enable computers to act intelligently to some aspects of human beings. These two areas, game design and game technology, represent a large part of the teaching and research strengths of the Institute.
One game that Khaled and Yannakakis recently helped develop is Village Voices which has been voted the best learning game in Europe at the 2013 Serious Game Awards. It was developed as part of the SIREN project, an FP7-funded interdisciplinary consortium made up of researchers from Malta, Greece, Denmark, Portugal, the UK and the US, along with Serious Games Interactive, a Danish Games Studio.
Let’s take a look at what makes a serious game and think about what made the project a success and what didn’t work so well.
The serious side of Village Voices aims to help school children learn conflict resolution skills. Players take on the role of one of four interdependent villages that are situated in a farm setting and given various quests to complete. Sitting side-by-side at separate computers, they may collaborate, share resources and help each other, or they may spread rumours and steal from each other. Much like any playground setting, children can play nicely, or they can be bullies.
The purpose of the SIREN project was to apply the latest advancements in game technology to the creation of serious games. The brief focused on innovations in procedural content generation, an area of artificial intelligence that automatically builds game elements like game levels or quest structures that would otherwise need to be designed manually. Another part of this innovative technology is detecting the emotions of players. Physiological responses can be measure through various tech like Electroencephalographic (EEG) sensors that can be used to detect a person’s emotional state directly by reading their brain’s electrical signals. Virtual agents were another technology that interested the research team. These agents are believable non-player characters that interact with the player with perceived intelligence.
The idea was to then create a game that would adapt to player behaviour, using emotion recognition tools to create an individual experience for each player. The decision to focus the game on teaching children about conflict resolution came later. Rather than to create a game about bullying behaviour, which is what a lot of people think of when they picture conflict between children, the research team wanted to explore the kinds of everyday conflicts that take place in school-yards. Friendship disputes, differences in opinion, and arguments over the possession of classroom items might seem trivial to adults, but they are important problems for children for whom school is their entire world. The SIREN consortium envisioned a game where players could experience and resolve conflicts in a dynamic setting.
Some people who make serious games say that the serious application of the game should take precedence over fun. They say that serious games should offer players a safe environment to try out new behaviours. Khaled disagreed with this approach to game design. ‘Serious game experiences need to feel real and not trivial. Otherwise why would we then use them to raise a mirror to reality?’
Village Voices allows actions that teachers might find surprising. Players can be destructive in that world. They can steal from each other. The game gives aggressive players a noose with which to hang themselves. Knowing that the person whose labours you just destroyed, or who stole the items you were collecting, is sitting right there next to you intensifies the game’s emotional experience. Exchanges can become heated between players. It is these kinds of heated exchanges that often makes games fun.
Some of the characters children can play in Village Voices
Games are usually poor at provoking emotional responses. Village Voices does exactly that. Khaled told me about one session in a British classroom (the game was tested across Europe). A female student had such an upsetting experience that she cried. After reflecting on the incident with her teacher, the researcher, and the other players, the girl later returned to play again. Khaled thought this was a breakthrough learning moment for the student.
So VillageVoices is a good learning tool, and it is also fun to play. But how successful was the team in applying game technologies like procedural content generation and emotion detection to its design? Khaled said that the experience of designing a game primarily for the purpose of testing technological innovations was the hardest part of the project. You might think that the role of a game designer is to work out the best solution to a problem given the technologies at hand. However, when the application of technology is the problem, the relationship between design and technology is more complex. Khaled said that the need to include particular game technologies in the design of Village Voices created a situation much like a rock band that needs to accommodate a peripheral member, such as a violin player. ‘While the violin player is not core to the project, the whole project needs to be compromised in some way in order to show off the violin player’s skills. It is not clear that the violinist is going to help the band make a new hit song, but it is clear he has to be there. So the band tries to find the violin player’s most positive qualities because he has got to be there.’
In Village Voices, the violin player’s best qualities are adaptive technologies that make the player experience more personalised. Because support for emotion detection plug-ins was never actually included in the final prototype, the game instead asks players directly how they feel about events in the game and introduces variations to the player experience according to their responses.
So far we have seen that Village Voices was successful according to the popular opinion of game-design peers at the European Serious Games — it won an award. We have also seen anecdotally that it is a provocative, if not fun game, based on the British student’s emotional response. But what does the SIREN team think about the game?
You cannot sit a child down in front of a computer and hope that they will magically learn something
According to Khaled, it can be difficult to implement learning games in classroom settings, and even more difficult to properly evaluate them. Project funding usually runs dry after around three years, and games take most of that time to develop. Gaining access to schools is also difficult. The game is a good fit for classes like social studies that are often held only once or twice a week. Together with the problem of semester breaks and short evaluation periods, as well as the tendency for teachers to have access to only a few computers often equipped with obsolete hardware, researchers would rarely see students engage with Village Voices over a long period of time. All these things place limitations on the design, testing, and evaluation of games for research purposes.
Rigorous evaluation is important as, ultimately, learning games are not black box tools. You cannot sit a child down in front of a computer and hope that they will magically learn something. That vital learning moment comes when players discuss their in-game experiences. As Khaled explained, ‘Playing the game is just half the experience. The other half is the subsequent discussion of the game experience.’
Given that discussion is so essential to the evaluation process, and that it is so difficult to get a sample of those discussions in a research setting, I asked Khaled if it was possible to turn the discussion into a game as well, to include it as part of the package. Khaled mentioned the meta-game, the part of the game where a player is both playing and watching themselves play the game. It is in the meta-game that players achieve the highest level of reflection. It works well as a kind of after-game discussion, a debriefing for players as they leave behind the conflicts of the game world and return to the everyday life of the school-yard; but Khaled added that of course it could be turned into a game. Achieving this level of reflection in the game package itself is just another challenge for the designers of serious games.
The Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta offers world-class postgraduate education and research in game studies, design, and technology. The inter-disciplinary team includes researchers from literature and media studies, design, computer science and human-computer interaction. Visit game.edu.mt or contact Ashley Davis (ashley.davis@um.edu.mt) for information about the Institute’s Master of Science (taught or by research) and Ph.D. programmes. This article forms part of The Gaming Issue.
About 2 years ago I was faced with a tough camera choice. I had been a Canon user for years having used a number of their DSLRs (a professional camera) and amassed more lenses than I needed.
Nevertheless, mirrorless cameras were starting to interest me with their attractive features. I loved the idea of carrying a lighter, compact camera with DSLR capabilities.
Ok, some explanations for the less geeky: film SLRs required a mirror. The mirror diverts the image to the viewfinder (where your eye can look through) but moves out of the way to expose the film when taking a picture.
Digital SLRs making use of an optical viewfinder still require a mirror. However, there is an alternative. A small display can replace the optical viewfinder. The main advantage being that eliminating the mirror allows for smaller and lighter cameras. There are disadvantages. Older electronic viewfinders are of low quality — a problem that is disappearing with the latest cameras such as Sony’s NEX, Olympus OM-D and Fuji X ranges.
Another disadvantage is focusing speed. Mirrorless cameras adopt slower contrast detection methods rather than the phase systems found on DSLRs. Such problems are being addressed through on-chip phase detection in the Nikon 1 cameras.
Finally, the smaller sensor size of mirrorless cameras reduces the camera’s image quality. Again, Sony’s new cameras, the Alpha 7 and 7R, provide full-frame sensors in a small and sturdy body .
With the ever-increasing range of high quality lenses for mirrorless cameras, it is tough to ignore them when choosing a new camera. I now find myself picking up my mirrorless camera, rather than my DSLR, more and more often.
My passion in life is succeeding at building competitive and highly competent teams of people who are driven by a common vision towards success, in other words, setting up successful companies. I am a serial entrepreneur with an almost fanatic obsession for using IT and sound business sense to create disruptive solutions in various industries, including the transportation, entertainment, gaming and big data analysis fields.
My interest in IT started when developing small applications as a teenager in secondary school, selling my first program within a few months for a very tiny amount of money. I spent it the following weekend. Soon after, I took Computer Science seriously and ended up representing Malta in various international events. In 1995, when I was 16 years old, I won Malta’s first-ever bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Five years later, I graduated from the University of Malta with a Bachelor’s degree in IT and a Master’s degree in Computational Linguistics. Then, I moved to the UK, where I read for a Doctorate in Computer Science and Search Engine Technology from the University of Sheffield while working for various European Union research projects.
In the UK, I set up one of my first companies. A few years later it became Traffiko, an Intelligent Transport Systems solutions company with offices in the UK, Malta, and Australia. I also wrote proposals that were funded by the UK Joint Research Council and the UK Ministry of Defence Science and Technology Lab (DSTL). Additionally, I published and presented over 23 peer-reviewed papers and journal articles. Around 2005, I built a cluster of servers that copied all text on the Internet to test search engine technology.
In the past decade, I have been focusing on setting up successful IT companies in multiple countries, dealing with the challenges of managing operations in different time-zones and people with different cultures and training. My current businesses all largely employ Maltese IT professionals. They include gaming platforms, cloud-based data-mining and next generation people-sourcing platforms.
The importance of having a diverse skill set and an open mind is also something that leads to career excellence and personal satisfaction. I believe that Malta offers a good base of IT professionals who can achieve brilliant results within the right framework.
I am currently a member of the European Business Angel Network (EBAN). The network helps provide access to early stage finance to entrepreneurs with great ideas that need seed funding, mentoring and guidance.
A good foundation in technology, engineering, and science subjects gives the right analytical and logical analysis skills. They are useful in development and solving issues encountered by IT and technology entrepreneurs — from formulating a business plan to turning a start-up company into an IPO (a company that can be launched on the stock market) in a planned manner.
IT skills should always be coupled with a sense of appreciation for business needs. Entrepreneurs need a healthy dose of optimism and inquisitive curiosity tempered by a logical, practical approach. This philosophy has always been my vital skill set for success.
Size can be both a limitation and an opportunity, depending on how you look at it. My idea is to turn Malta into a high-tech test bed. Malta has all the complexities of modern countries: high density, traffic, etc. yet it is tiny, manageable and low cost compared to most countries in the western world. What if we invite companies to come here, test their systems, and then once they’re happy they could implement them in larger countries? We could easily introduce an Intelligent Traffic Management System, Ambient Assisted Living in all the homes; basically the sky is the limit!
TxK marks
