“The EngD-programme gives Electronic Arts a great opportunity to collaboratively pursue research topics with academia that can bring competitive advantage to our games. We are very happy to be part of this scheme to develop high calibre candidates for the future of the industry.
[The impact the]… guys have had is in bringing energy and a broader interest in research and pulling in ideas from outside the team to impact our work… this is a great motivational benefit for our team.”
Dr. Mike Bassett, Head of UK Development, Electronic Arts
“Double Negative is committed to building links between the best academic research institutes and our world of Visual Effects for Film. We have run a number of initiatives in this area and we have been delighted with our work as part of the CDE Programme.
Steve Willey has been able to join our R&D department and work seamlessly with us on tools required for various parts of our stereo pipeline; a project which has been clearly defined in terms of the requirements for Steve’s EngD. Both Steve and the team at CDE have been realistic and pragmatic in recognising the flexibility we require as a company to make this working relationship a success and thus far it has proved a positive experience for all those involved.
As part of Steve’s work at Double Negative he has created two nodes within Nuke (a compositing piece of software) that allows a user working on stereo footage to automatically handle both image misalignment and colour differences between the two eyes. Such discrepancies always feature in stereo shot footage and the research Steve did into their causes and how best to fix them resulted in two well-used nodes that everybody at the company could take advantage of.”
Jeff Clifford, R&D Manager, Double Negative Visual Effects
“The CDE programme is an exciting research opportunity for innovation partnerships between academia and industry. CDE is extremely flexible to accommodate the industry’s diverse research phases, to take in students at any time throughout the academic year”
Maria Stukoff, Academic Partnership Manager, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
“This is an excellent programme which will benefit our industry significantly. Currently there is a big need for high calibre technical people and the proposed Centre will address this shortage effectively.”
Dave Walsh, Managing Director, Frontier Developments
“Wayne Young’s work has attracted commercial attention. A major air traffic organisation has recently asked us to quote for the lease of the software to them to enable them to have a ‘visualisation capability’. This will be used for replay and review of safety incidents at Incident and Accident Investigation Boards, as well as a showpiece display facility to show their traffic situation to other states. This would be very high profile and a great coup for us. When the RE started we just had a static 3D picture capability which would not have been as successful.
We also conducted an industry survey focused on 3D visualisation in air traffic control. We had hoped for about 50-100 responses, given that our market is relatively small. In fact we got around 250 and it provoked a lot of discussion on some LinkedIn groups – by accident I became the “top influencer” for quite a few weeks!!!”