Computer Science

Gibbons Lecture Series:
Computer Games: Friend or Foe?
Research Challenges in Game Technology

The third of four lectures on Computer Graphics in New Zealand, Thursday, 16th May, 2013
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Speaker: Dr Burkhard Wuensche
Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland

When: 6pm for 6.30pm start, Thursday 16th May, 2013
Where: Owen G Glenn Building, Room OGGB3/260-092
Note that there is public parking in the basement of the Owen G Glenn Building at 12 Grafton Road.

The lecture will be streamed live.

Dr Burkhard Wuensche has been with our department since 1994. After having completed his preliminary degree at the University of Kaiserslautern, he enrolled at The University of Auckland as a graduate student, completing his PhD in 2003, developing a toolkit for applying computer graphics in biomedical applications. He has held the positions of lecturer, then senior lecturer, since 2001. His areas of research interest include Scientific and Biomedical Visualization, Medical Imaging, Computer Graphics, Game Technology, Computer Aided Geometric Design, Geometric Modelling, Simulation Algorithms, Visualization applications in Bioinformatics, Information Visualization, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) and Cognitive Psychology. In 2011 a team led by Dr Wuensche was the overall winner of the SPARK 100K Challenge (New Zealand's premier business planning competition) for their project Clickworld.

Synopsis: Computer Games have been with us for a long time. However, more-recent technologies have increased the range of computer games and made them suitable for many serious applications ranging from education to healthcare.

Gaming has:

  • driven graphics hardware development to the extent that consumer-level hardware is now suitable for many professional scientific and engineering applications
  • provided ways to involve a wider segment of the population
  • given us a new understanding of what motivates people when interacting with computers

In this talk we will overview the history and current state of computer games. This will include discussion of how games are developed (game engines, project management), how the industry has been extended (mobile games, new interfaces, social games, serious games) and research challenges (using examples of our own work).

 

 
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