Department of Informatics

Final-year projects

In your third year, you undertake a substantial, year-long individual project. You are free to choose the project topic yourself, reflecting your personal interests. The project contributes to the portfolio of work you can show to prospective employers, or might spark a research interest that leads you on to postgraduate study.

In choosing a project you are matched with a supervisory tutor on the basis of their research expertise. Projects have ranged from a performance tracking website for a sports club to a system for predicting pit-stops in motor racing. Projects might involve incorporating virtual reality special effects into real video scenes, developing location-aware smartphone apps for interactive tasks, or integrating wearable or haptic technology into computer games.

Each year, prizes are awarded for the best computer science/IT project (sponsored by BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT) as well as for the best artificial intelligence and best digital media projects. All of our recent prize-winning student projects are available online.

Rob's project

In his final year project, Rob Dawson designed and implemented CELL, an 'ambient game' based on nature. The game player uses the mouse cursor to lead an organism through a 2D undersea environment, resulting in an interactive audio-visual experience.

CELL is physics-based: game objects move naturally and obey physical laws of collision. The playing environment is continuous and infinite, game elements being generated and placed in the environment just before they come into view. The result is a dynamic and ever-changing game in which each play-through is different. The game is implemented in C++. It uses the Cinder library for graphics and SuperCollider for real time audio synthesis, communicating between the two subsystems with Open Sound Control messaging.

Rob has recorded a short video clip from one play of the game: