London Fun and Games

This is my first attempt at taking a panoramic picture of the lovely new Kings Cross station. I’m sure there will be more in the future.

This morning we woke up late after all the excitement . In fact, we were so excited last night that we didn’t notice that the car taking is back to the hotel delivered us at the wrong place. For a while we sat in the bar having drinks and charging them to a room that didn’t exist. After we had been ever so politely reminded of this issue we grabbed a taxi back to “the other hotel called the Hilton that is in Kensington” for bed.

Today was spent having a great lunch and shopping for presents appropriate for a Pearl wedding anniversary. My suggestion, a Pearl handled revolver and one bullet, was not well received (and potentially dangerous) and so earrings and a watch with a vaguely pearlescent case were purchased instead. Oh, and the earrings were not for me.

Rob on Newsnight

I got an interesting phone call on Friday afternoon from Hannah, a researcher on Newsnight. They were doing a piece about the Imagine Cup and she wondered if I would like to come down to London and take part in a discussion about the competition. After subtly checking to see if it was a wind up by saying “You’re not a student are you?” I decided that it was all above board and agreed to hop on the train on Monday, a situation only slightly complicated by the fact that it was my wedding anniversary the following Tuesday (Solution: take number on wife with me).

And so at 10:30 tonight I found myself sitting chatting with Dame Evelyn Glennie, someone who I have long admired. Such a great person. The subject for the discussion was the project from winners of the 2012 Imagine Cup, Team Quadsquad, who had created a glove that converts sign language into speech. You can see the video of their finalist presentation here. We were debating the value of the technology, and how/if it could be fitted into the lives of the hearing and speech impaired.  For me the best thing about the night was that we were there at all, and that student teams had produced a device which provided the basis for discussion and development of the technology, something that the Imagine Cup is all about.

The whole thing was over in a trice and then we were ushered back out of the studio where I managed to arrange a blurry photograph. We then headed out into the night, Dame Evelyn to go back home and us to celebrate by having a drink in the wrong hotel. Great fun. I think the show will appear on iPlayer at some point in the future. I think the machine at home has recorded it. At least I hope so…

Update on Wednesday, August 22, 2012 at 12:47PM by Rob

Thanks for the link Phil:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01m7zjs/?t=27m46s

Control the Horizontal and the Vertical

I got an email today from a student looking for an interpolation technique to create smooth curves from a series of points. The reason he was after this was that he was making a game. His problem was that the technique looked a bit complicated and hard to implement on the target platform.

My advice in these situations is always “don’t sweat the complexity”. The simplest way to do this kind of thing is as a series of straight line segments. These are easy and quick to implement and should let you get something working really quickly. If the gameplay works OK, just stick with that technique and work with it. Remember that the player enjoying the game doesn’t know that you originally wanted to add curves. Only put the curves in if your game needs it.

If it turns out that lines would not be appropriate for your game theme, just change the game to one where lines do make sense. Remember that games are like “The Twilight Zone”. You control the horizontal and the vertical. The player is entering your universe, so you can define it as you like. Straight lines or curves, it’s all up to you. But start simple.

The Correctifier

 

We found the source of the pinball problem from last night. An extra we had bought had been supplied with incorrect wiring, sending power to one of the opto leds the wrong way. It seemed to survive this mistreatment though, and we just had to add my “Correctifier” (patent pending) which swaps the wires to make them the right way round.

This is the kind of wiring that we are working with, behind the flashing lights…..

Pinball Hacking

The best, in fact the only, good investment I have ever made was in my Twilight Zone Pinball machine. I got it ages ago from Richard, when he went over to the USA. It is huge, noisy and doesn’t always work very well. A perfect fit with me.

Tonight we spent some time playing with the machine in the best possible way. We took it to pieces and added some parts that I got in Australia while over there for the Imagine Cup. I’m always blown away by the sheer mechanical complexity of these things. Anyhoo, we managed to replace one faulty part (the clock you can see above now has four working lights) and break another. So I guess you could say we broke even on the day.