UK School Launches Degrees for Graphics and Game Engineering
There is apparently a shortage of technical talent
University of Leeds in England has announced recently that they will be offering undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in High Performance Graphics and Games Engineering starting on September of next year.
The school has collaborated with “a prestigious steering group” comprising of Barog Game Labs, Double Eleven, Epic Games, NVIDIA, Team 17, Sumo Digital, and Weaseltron. With this partnership, the university places students directly with industry experts and expects them to be the " ‘go to’ person for expertise in graphics, simulation and engine-technologies."
According to Sumo Digital COO Paul Porter, “There is a real shortage of technical talent which is a limiting factor in the growth of the UK games industry.” In fact, according to a study conducted in 2013, Britain would ne ed around 750,000 digital workers by 2017. Only a fraction of the country’s yearly graduates come from a computer science background.
To answer the looming talent shortage, Leeds is hoping to produce graduates able to work on graphics instead of focusing heavily on games creation. To quote from their course overview page, “This degree course focuses on computer graphics, where programmers must push computing resources to the limit ... to generate new levels of graphical realism and visual effects on cutting-edge hardware platforms.”
Simon Barratt, director of Barog Game Labs and chairman for the steering group, has said that there are very few courses in UK and in the world that train students in the technical aspect of “graphics, simulation, low-level performance and engine development techniques”. He hopes that this program will help students prepare with dawn of the virtual and augmented reality.
Prospective students can peruse the program’s requirements as well as the steps needed to apply. Applications for the program will open on May 24.
