Serious (and companies) Science game

Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent

• July 17, 2015
• Technology Product
• Comments

Video Games - Children Search and sometimes dangerous, it is not worth being mentioned in the same category as music or films, whether in cultural and economic terms?

Until recently, it was quite a common sight in the UK, not just in some newspapers, but many politicians. But a visit to Brighton this week would be enough to convince anyone that the games have to have a serious value.

At Hotel Metropole, political politics often go home mad at party conferences, a crowd dressed less formally together the largest conference on gambling in the UK brought. To develop, as the name suggests, it is mainly for game developers, and come to listen to Brighton (or snoozing) presentation, meeting with suppliers of technology, but especially to the network.

This show is not so much that US giant property editing, but many small businesses that make successful if precarious stage of development groups in the UK - and they desperately need to build contact.

Typical is a signature two-man called strange name, shows "drift bears can not?" An attractive, simple racing game that to build the retention of jobs in full-time university teachers in the game design.

Some in the crowd of designers, students, entrepreneurs and technology providers, there are also researchers. Your fields are genetics, public health and medical history, and here invited by the Wellcome Trust, the charitable foundation of the global public health.

Why? Well, they came to the results of a project developed to the knowledge of the gaming industry can prove a problem puzzling scientists to solve in many areas can be seen - how to manage large amounts of data. The Wellcome Trust, a little to my surprise, was to work with the video game industry for several years, decided that virtual reality could provide an answer.

So he teamed up with Epic Games to find the VR Big Data Challenge, a competition in which the developers have innovative ways to display large amounts of data start. The finalists gathered at the Hotel Metropole, show their projects for researchers who would use.

Game developers can choose from three data sets - the study of children born in the 1990s, the browser of the Sanger Institute at the University of Bristol ALSPAC genome and books of historical cases project examining medical records of 80,000 16th and 17th centuries.

VR Big Data challenge invites the gaming industry to visualize large amounts of data

Five finalists ask visitors to virtual reality helmets fitted - the kind that are used earlier in order to play a game - and take a walk through the 3D data visualizations. An Australian team puts me in a headset HTC lives to show how a medical researcher could compare children to look for common patterns in people with certain medical conditions. My guide through the observation is made in Melbourne, but on my screen as a light bar.

The competition was won by another company to combat all data LumaPie child. I ask one of the teams, Pascal Auberson, why put a virtual reality helmet may be more appropriate, a researcher who be easy to check a spreadsheet or view a normal computer monitor. "You can see the depth and shape much clearer," he explains. "It taps into the brain's natural ability to recognize patterns."

But surely we should computer programs to write these models to identify? "The human brain has some things better - you could write an algorithm to do it, but you could also use the head."

What's really impressive is the range of skills that are available in game companies, large and small is - of designers, engineers in modern software - used in new ways. "We game developers skills and apply them to the challenges of science, with those who have not had much interaction," explains Ian Dodgeon the Wellcome Trust.

"As an industry we are used to treat large volumes of data," said Mike Gamble of Epic Games game worlds are built up of millions and billions of polygons. - Human interaction is very complex interaction network ".

So competition is a revelation for those who do not realize that the construction of some Grand Theft Auto saga Candy Crush includes some very intelligent and creative people. Fortunately, Britain is a world power in this area, a fact celebrated in the development conference of the Culture Minister Ed Vaizey, in a speech.

Ed Vaizey development conference: "The difference between the US and the UK is not competition, it is capital."

Mr. Vaizey has developed and convince the chancellor, his opinion of tax relief, the company said that it is imperative to change to stop the brain drain in Canada a good relationship with the gaming industry. But when I talk to him after he accepted, it is part of the device is not yet awaken to the potential of games.

I did it to him that many of the games industry in the UK is US-owned and it is time that the world of finance to start the backup area. "This is the great history of technology", he admits. "The difference between the US and the UK are not competition, is the capital. We have a long way to always go the sophisticated investor community in the UK in terms of the."

Scientific and cultural value of the gaming industry are now recognized. But an industry that supports thousands of jobs in groups spread across the UK, Guildford in Dundee has, nor the city to come and play to convince.

It's more about VR Big Data challenge in today's issue of Tech Store - In the BBC World Service at 16:05 clock GMT / 17: 05 GMT