Introduction

When I was young I though that I loved games* in general but after I grew up I verified that not only the games are nice but virtual reality is also a nice topic in Computer Science and it doesn’t have to be a game to be fun: augmented reality is an example (I expect to talk about that on another topic).

I grew in the 80’s, so yes, I played the ATARI, passing to the SEGA’s Mega Drive, Nintendo’s unforgivable Super Nintendo, and the Sony Playstation with its astonishing 3D graphics.

I’d be unfair if I didn’t mention the PC games, they’ve always accompanied me parallel to consoles.

I thought of computer as something mysterious, a simple box a complete interaction but not a finished experience, something that every year evolves and changes the way people work, behave and conduct their lives. How a box can bring you fun, information, relationships and many things in such diversity. How people put such things inside of it? How it works?

With all those things in mind I decided study Computer Science.

I’m not going to describe the whole course, but it was very important for me, I discovered that as a woodworker can create useful benches I could create useful softwares and that these softwares would depend on what I want it to do.

To create softwares you need knowledge about many things, for example, if you want to create a software about water treatment you should know not only what water treatment is but how that works and how companies of this segment are work. Besides that, one thing is indispensable: a programming language. A programming language instructs the computer to perform some actions according to your needs.

Nevertheless, along the course I learned many interesting technologies, one of them was mobile development. I watched a lecture about a guy which was talking about something very recent at that moment, it was the .NET framework. He was saying that it was a powerful technologies and one could create many applications easily, also for mobile platforms, such as cell phones, PDAs, Palms, etc. In that moment, my curiosity awoke. I remembered the old times where I had some mini-games devices (bought by my father after I cried a lot to him – thanks dad) so I though that creating games for cell phones would be the next step in games.

I could not imagine but that was the start of my journey, the first spark. I decided learning how to program in mobile devices, that’s where I came across BREW a C/C++ API for CDMA cell phones, mine was one, so I decided to learn it. I had to learn many things, I read two books about it and created a project to put the experience on practice, this was my first game. Successfully I could commercialize this game on Venezuela after mailing many publishers.

I got a job on that area, which was very gratifying. I felt the value of my sweat and all effort that I had put to make this happen.

Unfortunately, here in Brazil companies are very small and that time I was looking for a better job so I changed again, this time not for a game company, but the passion for games is still there.

Since then, I’ve been studying computer games by my own, and I’m crossing against many interesting topics which I want to share with people and that is the main reason I’m creating this blog. So if you feel somehow similar to me, do not hesitate in following it, we can share some good experience over this area.

These days, I verified that being a computer scientist is different than a programmer. A computer scientist has a compromise with science as the name says. In my understanding a computer scientist should research at least whilst a programmer needs to make the computer perform what is needed by the project.

I intend to focus on Augmented, Mixed Reality; 3D Modeling; Programming; Human Computer Interaction and new technologies.

Thanks for reading,

See you soon

*When I say games I refer to computer games and console games