I am Sam Hinton, a lecturer in media at the University of Canberra.  My main interests are:

• 3D Graphics and Animation (from a design and art perspective - see the unit I teach in 3D Animation)
• Graphics programming - 2D and 3D, mainly with an artistic emphasis (I am a hacker, not a computer scientist)
• Games and gaming theory - I am working on a research project about the Australian games industry, supported by a UC Early Career Researcher grant.  I'm also very interested in the tension between games and stories, and the role and importance of player interaction (player/player, player/computer) in all kinds of games (not just computer ones!)
• The role of technology in contemporary society - especially visual technologies

Below is a feed from my blog at http://meetpi.edublogs.org/

MeetPi (rss_2.0) (Sam Hinton: Research. Comment. Concept.)
Four game studios in one day On Wednesday last week I spent a very busy day battling through hordes of world youth day pilgrims as I ran around Melbourne visiting four Australian game developers: Firemint, Redtribe, Tantalus and Transmission. I was interviewing CEOs and senior management of these companies as part of an early career researcher grant. I didn’t [...]
Games: mobility, haptics and physical space I’ve been prompted to think a bit about games and space because of an upcoming workshop at RMIT in July. The workshop is being organised by Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson and focuses on mobile technologies, gaming cultures and the haptic. Nice topic for me, because it bring together interests I have [...]
Internet histories: Perth I’ve just got back from Perth where Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland ran the second Internet Histories Workshop. I presented a paper on the role that AARNet played in the development of the internet in Australia. My main point: that internet history cannot and should not be represented by a single monolithic narrative, [...]
Blog has moved I’ve just moved my blog from the Creative server at the uni to edublogs. There are a few reasons I decided to move. The main one is that I don’t want to keep updating the Wordpress software - it’s a pain, and if I don’t do it, then it leads to security problems. [...]
Phoenix colour image Just for fun I tried compositing three nearly identical sequential black and white images taken from the Phoenix lander on the hunch that they were taken using red, green and blue filters. The result is a colour image, below (click for a larger image). Image constructed from raw images at the NASA Phoenix images page. [...]
Games need a new classification system Recently there has been renewed debate in Australia about the possibility of the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) extending the computer game rating system to include an R18+ classification category (restricted the people over the age of 18). It’s an interesting issue from an academic perspective because it raises questions about the [...]
Juicy new Blender Looks like the team at Blender.org are getting close to releasing the latest version of the Blender open source 3D app. The new version, 2.46, adds a whole host of new functions to Blender, some of which are very exciting to me. One of the more lovely ones is a complete rewrite of [...]
Qantas Flights Here’s a small applet I created in Processing which shows a visualisation of Qantas flights for a 24 hour period on the 11 March 2008. The data is scraped directly from the Qantas timetables on their web site and saved into a text file. The applet then loads to text file and [...]
Lectures and the utilitarian student Recently the Australian higher education supplement published an article by Craig Deed about students walking out on lectures. In it he describes the sorry state of the university lecture, which are increasingly characterised by small attendances. There are a number of perspectives on this observation, many of which essentially argue that students have changed, academics have [...]
Virtual terrorism An article came out in the Australian newspaper about virtual terror. The article looked at th possibility of terror groups using virtual worlds (Second Life and World of Warcraft were mentioned), and received a typically skeptical response from the community over at Slashdot. And yes, there is much in that article to set off [...]