 My name is Thorsten Ryder. Welcome to Natural Motion. I'm the CEO of Natural Motion. This is where people hang out. When they want to eat something or play a few video games, it's a good move. At Natural Motion, we create technology for games and films. We simulate human beings and animals and try and create completely interactive versions of them. These are some of the games that we've been working on. You can see we've got GTA here, Star Wars, Redemption. Game development and game technology development is surprisingly difficult. A lot of problems have to be solved. That means that people with a background in physics have a big advantage. If no force acts on an object, then the way it's moving won't change. If it's at rest, it'll stay at rest. Or if it's on the move, it'll keep on moving, unless a force acts on it. If an unbalanced force acts on something, you can start anything moving, even a house. If you give a rabbit a tiny little nudge in space, once it's going, it'll just keep going and going and going, unless another force acts on it. What you see on the screen here is a fully physically simulated character. We use a physics engine in real time that simulates the physical properties of the body. A physics engine is computer software that sets the rules of physics in a game. For example, making sure that gravity is the right strength. What we're doing here with the Red Arrow is we're applying physical forces and impulses to the character. The character then physically reacts to that. For example, he's trying to protect himself, always trying to balance. Another advantage of using physics is that if you change the character, so for example, if you make the character much bigger, the character will act very differently. It will respect the laws of physics while our AI is trying to control it. Again, obviously, that's exactly what you would find in real life as well. He does not like... When something shoves, pushes, nudges, or hits an object, it changes the way it moves and can be quite annoying. Backbreaker is an American football game that we've been working on. He had natural motion. It's the first sports title that's fully interactive. So it's completely live just like a real sports event would be. You don't know anymore what's going to happen whilst you play the game. Backbreaker is based on real-world physics. They've got virtual muscles that act in the same way as real muscles. What is special about using physics in computer games is that it gives us the ability to model interactions that would otherwise be impossible to record or too complex for animators to create by hand. We use a real-time physics simulation to create something that is much more real. I'm Matthew Best. I'm the euphoria producer here on Backbreaker and the head of technology production for natural motion. The physics engine is about building your atomic components of your simulation. If you can simulate a ball bouncing off a plane, you can simulate a bullet bouncing off a wall. If you can build a wall, you can build a house. And if you can build a house, then you can build a whole city and you don't need to worry that two miles down the road in that city bullets aren't working. If you've got a physics engine, it should be fine. Before physics engines, people would have to create this by hand. Each interaction would be lovingly crafted by an animator or would be recorded by an actor in a mocap suit. If you look at the complexity of all these interactions going on here, it's just impossible to imagine how many animations it would take to make that look good. We don't animate someone stretching out his arm. We teach a person how to extend an arm in a way that complies with real-world constraints and biomechanics. If you've got control over physics engine, you can create all sorts of alternative physical worlds. You can explore low-gravity, high-gravity, different sorts of frictions. It's good fun to explore. I'm Chris Allen. I'm lead euphoria integration engineer at Natural Motion. Gravity is a useful force. It keeps us on the ground. On Earth, the acceleration due to gravity is about 10 metres per second per second. But changing the acceleration due to gravity changes the way things move. What we've got here is we've turned the gravity down to minus 1.67 metres per second per second. Now that's the same as the gravity on the moon and you can see that in this circumstance, the guys obviously get torn off into the air and they do come back down, but not nearly in the way that we'd normally expect. We've really started to abuse physics now. We've turned gravity right off. Here we see some poor guys that really don't know what's going on. And they are effectively now playing in space. The most important thing from my level of physics that I still use every day is momentum. It's the thing that particularly in Bat Breaker really drives the gameplay experience and having an understanding of how that works and how to manipulate it to get the results we want is vital importance. The larger the mass of an object and the faster it moves, the more momentum it has. The momentum is the mass times the velocity. Velocity is speed in a particular direction. And in this case we've made him weigh a lot more while still maintaining the same speed that he was before, so that has increased his momentum by more than tenfold. If we set the guys to be the exact same mass, as soon as they collide into each other, they cancel each other out and all will happen and you'll get a tackle where both guys will just fall to the ground in the exact same place. The best way to get into games programming is to develop a strong background in physics and maths. I studied physics at Brunel University. When I was studying physics I had no idea I would end up here. I was studying it because I was curious about the way the world worked. I found my physics A level pretty interesting. It was an excellent start point. My teacher was really good at giving us examples that made things funny and interesting to do. Working in Atomotion is a challenge but it's a very rewarding challenge. You get to produce something that other people recognise and see and it's out there with your name on it. The reason we require people with a strong science background is that a lot of the problems that we're dealing with are uncharted territories. Physics obviously is not one of the easiest subjects. However, the benefits of doing it is that you're much, much better prepared for subjects like games programming.