PS Vita Fun and Games

The picture doesn’t do justice to the 5 inch screen on the Vita, but it does show you just how large the device is.

I wasn’t going to buy a Vita until I saw one running a game. I’d been lulled by iPads and Smartphones into thinking that they were the ultimate in portable gaming.

They aren’t.

The Vita is a proper, high performance, gaming platform that you just happen to be able to fit into your jacket pocket. The games look like PS3 or Xbox 360 games. Playing Uncharted (as I have been doing) on the Vita is just like playing it on the PS3. What’s more, with twin joysticks in exactly the right places, the control is like using the PS3 gamepad as well. It should have at least three hours of battery life too, which is lot more than you will get from a Smartphone if you start playing 3D games with it.

I am very impressed with the gaming experience. I’m also impressed by the other programs on the device. The browser is perfectly serviceable and the on-screen keyboard is one of the best I’ve used. You can also use it for Skype, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr should you be the sociable type. If they put Amazon Kindle on it I’d be happy to leave the iPad at home and take the Vita with me on trips.

There are some niggles. The use of highly expensive, Sony proprietary, memory cards is a pain and the games are closer to console prices than I’d like. And the device itself is a bit pricey. although that might change over time.

If you are a “proper” gamer who wants to take a “proper” gaming experience with them on the bus then the Vita is a very attractive proposition.

Open Day

These are some of the open day attendees. I’ll settle for “Mostly Happy”.

We had another Open Day today. Good attendance for a mid-week session, which was nice. There was even a chap there who had got hold of my yellow book, written some games and made money out of them. Can’t be bad.

This is the winner of the prize draw, accepting her prize from Warren.

Micro Framework Robots at Tech Days

Straight after my complete “demo meltdown” last week I was greatly cheered by some robots that one of the chaps at Tech Days was showing off. He had taken a toy robot and make it properly useful by adding potentiometers to the joints so that the .NET Micro Framework controller could properly position the arm.

These are the GHI controller boards that he built up.

He even had a demo where the robot was controlled by someone in front of a Kinect sensor. And his worked…..

Reaching for XNA

We came across this issue in the lecture this afternoon. If you are using a machine which lacks really high performance graphics, perhaps because it has an on-board graphics display, you might get an error when you try to run an XNA program on it, because the graphics hardware can’t keep up.

If this happens you can try changing the Game Profile in the project settings for the game. If you set them to “Reach” this will reduce the demands that are made on the machine, and might make the game work.

It worked for me in the lecture….

Kinect and Windows Phone Demos

You can find all the Kinect demos and presentation materials on Skydrive here. I hope they work for you…

Imagine Cup Live Meetings

If you are thinking about entering the Imagine Cup (and you should be) then I’m hosting a couple of Live Meetings next week which will tell you all about the early stages:

Session 1 -  5:00 pm GMT  Tuesday 21st February

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/zaaz1com/meet/FB7G74

Session 2 – 7:00 am GMT Wednesday 22nd February

 https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/zaaz1com/meet/D4Z68P

These are the times and the links to the Live Meetings themselves. Both meetings have the same content, come to the one that best fits your schedule.

If you have any interest in the competition then please come along. There’s still plenty of time to form a team and get cracking.

Final Tech Days Session Fun

This is the last shot of an audience for a while. Unless I decide to take a picture of the students at the C# lecture on Monday…

Did my final Windows Phone session today, just a few hours after I’d finished the Kinect one. I’d been assigned the “World Forum” theatre, which as you can see is pretty large. But there were enough folks there to make it look fairly full, and they were a great audience. A 75 minute session is quite a long time. I’ve been to shorter movies. Thank you all for paying attention and staying awake, in spite of the session being directly after lunch…

Every. Demo. Worked. (mostly)

Did my Kinect session first thing this morning, which was nice because it meant I had ages to set up. So I tested all the demos and they all worked. The only problem we had was with the “Kinect Kiss Detector”, which considering the audience demographic that you see above is not surprising.

Every. Demo. Failed.

A big audience to fail in front of….

What do you do when you present a session and every demonstration fails? I didn’t know this until today. The answer is that you reach the end and then you go and find out why.

I was doing a Kinect session for Geek Night today. This was kind of ambitious, what with carrying the sensor around all over the place. So I’d tested everything before I set off, and I was confident that it would all work on the night.

It didn’t.

I was very happy when the first demo worked, but I can’t take too much credit for that because it was the demonstration application that ships with the SDK. As soon as I moved onto my code that problems began. Programs that just worked suddenly locked up before my eyes. All of them.

It took me a while to figure out what had happened. As in the case of most big failures, it was a collection of little things that added up to make a catastrophe. First thing was that I was using my lovely little Alienware netbook rather than the “Big Ole Dell” that I usually use. The main reason I took the Alien was that it made room in the case for the Kinect sensor. That and the way the keyboard lights up. It is just powerful enough to run the demos, but just powerful enough is fine. Except today it wasn’t.

Something has mysteriously turned all my overclocking settings back down to normal. I turned them on ages ago when I got the device and forgot all about them. Today, after a lot of head scratching, I checked in the BIOS and there they all were. Back where they shouldn’t be.

A bit of tweakage and all is well. I’ve even tried flipping to the built in high performance graphics, which also helps (but also breaks the Windows Phone emulator – so I don’t usually use it).

I’m kicking myself for not testing the demos on site this afternoon when I had a bit of free time, but I assumed that since they worked before they’d work again.

Oh well. Everybody at the session seemed to have a good time. Except me.

Mega Student Sessions at TechDays

I like a big audience, but, blimey.

Did a couple of Student to Business sessions in TechDays today. Great fun. Above are the folks who turned up to the first one. Click to through to the larger Flickr image and try to find yourself on the picture (Note – only do this if you were actually at the session)

This is the slightly smaller audience at the second session. I think word must have got out by this point….

Tech Days is being held in a massive cinema complex near Brussels. They have some old projectors in the foyer, this is a close up of one of them.

Now on to the Netherlands and Geek Night.

Update on 2012-02-16 18:22 by Rob

I promised I'd post the slides and demos here. I'll do this soon. If you are in a hurry the decks and demos were very similar to the ones I delivered yesterday.

Tech Days Belgium

Another country, another audience…

Today it was up bright and early to fly to the Netherlands and take a train to Belgium for my sessions at TechDays. I’m giving sessions on Windows Phone and Kinect. I always wonder just why I do this kind of thing, particularly when I’m sat on a train watching unfamiliar countryside whizz past in the rain. Then the session starts and I remember why. Great fun. Great audience and a good response from all. I promised I’d put the slides and content on the interwebs and so here it is. Remember, if you make a fortune from anything based on it I’m in for 10%. It’s only fair…

This was my setup for the talk.

The only snag was that when I got back to the hotel I found that they’d run out of numbers for access to the hotel WIFI. Apparently a new system is being installed tomorrow and at the moment they have no network access. So this post is being made from the future.

Nokia in Sunshine

I took this picture yesterday, when the sun was shining. Apparently the Lumia has some fancy polarisation magic that it does to make the screen visible in bright sunlight. Seems to work too.

Windows Phone Emulator Skin Switcher

If you are bored with the Windows Phone that you get with Visual Studio you can swap it for a much nicer looking device by downloading the Windows Phone 7 emulator Skin Switcher from here.

PlayStation Vita

Apparently it is called a PlayStation Vita because of the associations with speed and life. I must admit the name makes me thing of crisp-bread. And I wasn’t going to get one. Oh  no. With a phone and a Nintendo DS 3D I couldn’t see a reason to own the device. Until I saw it running.

The graphics are very impressive. Like very, very impressive. It really is a PS3 you can carry around with you. I had a go at Ridge Racer (I think I’ve bought that game more times that I’ve bought different copies of Star Wars) and the presentation and graphics were excellent. And I got a cool pair of (surprisingly good) blue headphones as well.

For casual games phones and iPads are great. For something a bit different and the 3D effect the Nintendo DS 3D has a lot to offer. But for hard core gamers I reckon the PS Vita has an awful lot going for it.

Open Day at Hull

Open Days are here again. This is some of the audience who sat through my talk this afternoon. Hope you all had a good time and thanks for braving the elements to come and see what we do at Hull. We are holding more Open days in the next few weeks.

This is Warren handing out a copy of a great book (Oh Yes) to the winner of the prize draw at the end. Those that came along also took home a printed copy of the C# Yellow Book. If you want to find out more about that, and perhaps download other coloured books, you can find them at www.csharpcourse.com

Kinect Fun Labs at Imagine Cup

There is a rather interesting new addition to the ranks of the Imagine Cup competitions this year. The Kinect Fun Labs Challenge is out to get you exploring new ways to use the Kinect sensor. The nice thing about it is that at the moment all you need is the idea. The implementation can come later. They are actually giving out 100 Kinect for Windows sensors (these are the special ones that have higher resolution close up and other interesting tweaks) to the ideas they like the best, so that you can realise them and enter the next phase of the competition. Next week there is a Live Meeting all about how it works. If I was still a student, I’d be there.

Go see “The Artist”

The Artist is a comedy drama about a falling silent star and a rising talking one. Sort of “A Star is Born” but in black and white, with hardly any speech, and no Barbra Streisand.  But there is a dog.

I liked it a lot. Touching, funny and with a heart. If you want a genuinely different cinema experience, you should get to see it.

Imagine Cup

We had a meeting today about the Imagine Cup. A whole bunch of our students seem very keen to take part. No idea why. Unless it is the chance to make a name for themselves, win some prizes, have fun making something useful, pick up useful skills, maybe even get to go to Australia and win a chunk of cash….

You should take part too. The Imagine Cup could change your life. I’ve seen it happen. Form a team and sign up here.

Kinect Skeleton Viewer

The new Kinect for Windows SDK is now available. It works really well, but they have changed the API slightly (generally it is a lot tidier now). If you want a simple program to get you started using the skeleton data I’ve done a quick conversion of one of the demos in the Kinect book that I’m working on. You can download the project from here. Now all I have to do is update all the other fifty or so demos and the 12 chapters. Lovely.

Made in Hull

These are some of the games and applications that students and staff at Hull have made over the last few months. Some of them are implementations of games produced at Three Thing Game and Evil Squash.

To take a more detailed look, just click on the icon to be magically transported into Windows Marketplace.