From HIT Lab NZ
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Former HIT Lab NZ PhD student Anders Henrysson scored a straight sets victory at the International Mobile Gaming Awards (iMG Awards) last week in Barcelona, beating 170 developers to win both the US $10,000 Grand Prix Award and US $2,500 Best Technical Achievement Award for his innovative mobile game ‘AR Tennis’.
Former HIT Lab NZ student takes out top international mobile gaming awards
Former HIT Lab NZ PhD student Anders Henrysson scored a straight sets victory at the International Mobile Gaming Awards (iMG Awards) last week in Barcelona, beating 170 developers to win both the US $10,000 Grand Prix Award and US $2,500 Best Technical Achievement Award for his innovative mobile game ‘AR Tennis’.
Anders, from Sweden, developed his award winning game while researching as a PhD intern at the HIT Lab NZ and working with the Norrkoping Visualization and Interaction Studio (NVIS) at Linkoping University. His two player game concept uses two camera phones as virtual tennis rackets to hit a virtual ball across a tennis court map.
He will now be supported by the coalition of iMG Award sponsors NVIDIA, Alias (now Autodesk), Nokia, Orange, Auchan and Belle-de-Mai Media Park in Marseilles to bring the game to market and will be given publishing deals with a major game publisher.
Anders said he was thrilled at winning both awards.
“Winning these awards means I’ll be able to work with NVIDIA and the iMG Award partners to turn my ‘AR Tennis’ concept into a fully fledged game and help realise the huge potential of this new genre of mobile gaming. The prize money will be used to continue my research into mobile games development.”
The AR game is an innovative Bluetooth and camera and game concept. By using the camera in a mobile phone, a player can track a marker which displays a tennis court on the screen. Two people can then play opposite each other, use the phone as a racquet, and then play tennis, with the ball, the court, and the other player on the screen.
With independents competing against well established development houses the Awards have attracted entries from both ends of the games development spectrum. Twenty developers from all four corners of the globe were short listed by the judging panel as finalists in the Awards.Supported by the Award sponsors, finalists then produced demonstrable versions of their game concepts for final judging.
iMG Awards judging panelist and mobile game publisher Dr. Mark Ollila described the awards as a mechanism for the growth and development of innovative mobile concepts and content.
“Many of the concepts seen are not commercially viable today but will pave the way for future gaming elements and content. We received entries from students, research laboratories, and many entities outside of the traditional gaming space and people have demonstrated a range of new and exciting possibilities for this medium.”
Kamar Shah, head of games industry marketing, Nokia Multimedia said the winners' bold exciting design and development achievements would “impact positively on new games experiences for the next generation of Nokia's mobile gaming platform”.
Jesse Wijnberg, at Orange said entrants this year had brought “some truly great concepts that not only challenge the tried and tested game genres, but deliver genuinely new, never seen before experiences to mobile gamers”.
For more information on the awards see http://www.imgawards.com
