Case Studies and Testimonials - Video Interviews

Video

Computer and Software Engineering

McMaster University - Dr. Martin von Mohrenschildt

Ontario's well-established education infrastructure includes thousands of students enrolled in degree and certificate programs in computer sciences and engineering.

Transcription:

McMaster University 
Dr. Martin von Mohrenschildt
Associate Professor, Computing and Software

The software engineering program and also the software game design are accredited programs. It’s a program where students get a solid education in software engineering and in addition you get all the courses related to gaming, virtual reality issues but also courses in multimedia which allow the student to communicate with an artist. That’s a very important aspect in game design but in designing any application where you have visual impressions. The gaming industry is in the meantime a very mature industry. The interesting thing is it really came with the power of the computer. Today a game and physics running behind the game physics being the thing that makes it look like a real game where the game is happening. It’s essentially the same technology which is used for testing an airplane, testing a car in the virtual environment. 
Today if you want build a product you most of the time really want to first build a virtual environment and not a prototype. You can test a product in a virtual environment and then with much lower cost have the product designed with human aspects and interaction aspects and bring it then onto the market.

The software and gaming design program at McMaster gives student a very unique and broad skill base. But the very interesting thing is they get a very solid course in engineering which includes signal processing, so it enables them to write what we call physics engines but also the graphics and the art as well as the software design aspects. We were in contact with several industries and can be quite confident that we can actually fill the demand of the companies asking for these kinds of students. But it’s really not only the game design industry; it can go from architectural office to car manufacturing. All of these industries in the meantime really need the technology. Ontario is really, from my point of view an ideal location. We have several universities which offer solid education to many students. We have a lot of student bases and you do not have to be in California or you do not have to be in Japan in order to do it. Today most of the games developed in small cities which makes it actually more comfortable for the developers, makes it more attractive for the developer to live there. Now the environment is all there. We have the infrastructure from high speed telecommunications, we have the personnel, it’s an attractive living environment. McMaster University in particular started out by defining the software profession as an engineering profession. This is really a very important step. It goes away from you hire somebody off the street who just writes your program, to somebody who is a professional who has a social, ethical and professional responsibility to develop a solid software product. This is really at the core of the developing modern software systems.

So what we have here is a capsule on top of a platform, called the Stewart platform, 6 degree of freedom motions, so it moves in all 6 degrees of freedom, has quite some acceleration forces. This is 0.6 feet G; it’s quite a strong force. You have a surround sound system here. At the moment we have one channel of projection, so one visual impression. This is really designed to fool all the senses; it would fool all the senses of a human being when being in there. The most people I use to play video games so they have visual impressions. Perhaps they have some audio, sometimes in surround audio, but they never have a physical or force feedback from the system their interacting with and this is the new trend. I mean this goes even from robotic operators where people actually try to touch objects and they need physical feedback from the virtual, from the remote to the person and this really allows us to study these kinds of impressions. If you want to put such a system into your development environment you have to put something like half a million dollars there and you still need the people with the expertise. So we can provide the expertise and the facility and are very interested in working together with a company to solve some problems they might be interested in. I just recently had the discussion with people from a mining company. In a mining company you’re driving vehicles underground with different views and traffic management. You can learn all of these kinds of scenarios since its open architecture and train people. And quite often when they go there they feel themselves in a familiar situation. But you can also expose people in here to situations which you never actually want them to experience in the real world. But still they experience it in there so they know how it would feel if they come into trouble in some situation.

In our programs we give a very solid education which has an add on in virtual reality and simulation. So even if the student would not perhaps be directly writing video games, he could be working for civil engineering company, he could be working for automotive, multimedia industry and would have the solid background on it. The other very big aspect of it is human computer interaction and computer interface design. Quite often when you look at computer, writing the core of the computer program is quite clear, but the interaction with the computer program, the human computer interaction is a very difficult topic.

Dr. Martin von Mohrenschildt
Associate Professor, Computing and Software
McMaster University

This video segment requires the use of Real Player software. If you do not have that player installed on your computer, you can download it free from here.