Last night the BBC aired a program (can be seen here if your really interested) hosted by Physicist Brian Cox which featured some of my work (nice N95' shots) and some from my colleagues in Infolab21 and apart from elevating me to the exalted tile of ‘Boffin’ its gives me a excuse to show one of my favourite projects of 2008 I had undergraduate Drew Jackson working on. The title of the project was Lancaster Bomber (in honour of the famous WW2 aircraft named after our fair city) and it’s a game whereby we recreated the Lancaster University campus to allow me to fly around and shoot at the buildings in my very own Lancaster Bomber. Here comes the stress relief if you watch the video from the BBC you will see my workplace Infolab21 and if you then watch the game you will see me blow it up in the game (after a nice flying manoever through the underpass which is were our buses depart from )which after a hard day can be deeply satisfying.

Interestingly the models of campus were made using Google Sketch-up (didn’t quite have enough time to finish all the detail for the whole of campus but that can be done later) and transferred to Dark Basic to turn it into a game. This proved to be a remarkably flexible solution ( especially as Drew hadn’t done any 3D modelling before) and meant we could use the models in a variety of forms  on different platforms. My limited experience of flight simulator controls shows up in the video so I am planning to replace them by using an N95 instead.

This might be considered a bit lower tech than my usual fair but is a lot more accessible for the general public. As an aside from a presence based mobile social network project he is working on with me and Will (I will blog about it in future) my MSc student Klen Copic Pucihar knocked up this very neat little WidSets Widget called Widget Maps that allows you to get your location position using an address search facility  which then plots it on Google maps on your phone. The widget also allows you then to move the cursor to your exact location and get the corresponding latitude and longitude which you can share with your friends. The nice thing is that this will work on any J2ME phone supporting WidSets client Irrespective of having access to some form of positioning technology (sort of low tech my location).

BTW its currently available as a beta widget on the Widsets site so enjoy