Number of game developers drops

The number of video game developers in the UK is down almost a tenth in the past two years, with the industry body complaining that the country is at a 'competitive disadvantage', writes the Independent.

Trade association Tiga has published figures that show 9 900 gaming development staff were employed in Britain in July 2008. That had fallen to 9 010 at the end of last month.

Tiga's chief executive Richard Wilson says: "At a time when the global video game industry is growing, the UK development workforce is declining."

Waterloo Labs, a team of engineers inside National Instruments (NI) unveiled the LabView source code to 'EyeMario,' which demonstrates how video gamers can use their eyes to control Nintendo gaming consoles, states EE Times.

Marrying NI software with electrically isolated data converters from analogue devices enabled the EyeMario reference design, which NI is making available as a free download. Besides gaming, EyeMario will also being adapted to use in the treatment for amblyopia as well as to empower people who have lost the use of their hands.

"Medically, these measurements are not new, but our use of them for control is," said Chris Culver, an analogue hardware engineer and Waterloo Labs team member.

A new Apple patent describes several interesting ideas for playing games with others in an augmented reality space, states Tuaw.

The patent, called 'Interactive Gaming with Co-Located, Networked Direction and Location Aware Devices,' describes an iPhone app that would network a series of devices in the same real-world space and use the phone's hardware to track and show other players as the game is being played.

For example, players could use their devices as a 'gun,' and the GPS, gyroscope, and accelerometer in the iPhone would all work together to figure out if shots 'fired' from one device would actually hit another.