As I posted previously, this semester I’m teaching a new course in video game design and production at the University of Colorado. We have a great group of students, and they’ve just finished putting together their first game, of two that they’ll make in the course. These games were developed by students of CSCI 4830-008, working in teams of two. This is the first of two games they’ll be making this semester in the Unity game engine. They were asked to create a 3-5 minute adventure / scavenger hunt game, where the...
read moreJust wanted to announce that I’ll be teaching a course on video game design and production over at the University of Colorado, starting tomorrow. We’re going to be using Unity and covering all of the basics: materials, terrain, animations, particle systems, programming, physics, etc. It’ll be a design-based course, with the students creating two games over the course of the semester. You can check out the course outline...
read moreA showcase of screen captures from some of our past and current projects. You’ll find a variety of projects here: games, simulations and data visualizations. Our older projects were all in Second Life – our newer work is mainly with the Unity game engine. A number of these screenshots were taken during the making of the game, so they may lack polish, especially in the on-screen UI elements. Click an image preview to view it full-size. TerraViz An experiment: Can we use a game engine to visualize scientific data? TerraViz is...
read moreThis last week a nine-week online course entitled “Learning From Data”started, taught by by Caltech Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa. As they promoted… “A real Caltech course, not a watered-down version, broadcast live from the lecture hall at Caltech.” The course objective is “machine learning that covers the basic theory, algorithms, and applications, that enables computational systems to adaptively improve their performance with experience accumulated from the observed data.” A book by the same title...
read moreI was poking around in Nathan Yau’s FlowingData blogs and found a historical gem. On January 1, 2008, Nathan wrote a blog on John Tukey, the pioneer in exploratory statistics. I did not realize that Tukey was also a pioneer in the early use of computers for data visualization! In 1972 using “32 buttons and a lightpen” on “an Information Display’s IDIIOM refresh CRT driven by a Varian 620/i minicomputer linked to an IBM 360/91″, Tukey developed the PRIM-9 program to do multivariate analysis. It handled up to...
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