HoloDek Media Archive

Coolhand Interviewed on FNX Our own Coolhand was once again the voice of HoloDek in a recent interview on 92.1 WFNX Click Here to listen to the clip

HoloDek News Feature at SeacoastOnline.com HoloDek hits the news again with an excellent article written by Michael Blinn for Seacoast Online. Visit Seacoast Online and read the article for yourself.

HoloDek in the news again! CBS National radio recently ran a news piece about our coverage in Wired Magazine. Click Here to listen to the clip You can read the Wired Magazine article here.

More News Coverage! HoloDek was featured on the front page of The Hampton Union today on March 3 in a great article by Susan Morse. Be sure to pick up your copy or check out the article at Seacoast Online.

HoloDek in the news…again! HoloDek was featured on Chronicle on Wednesday, March 1 at 7:30pm on channel 9. Look for the spot to be available to view here soon!

NECN Interview NECN recently came to our facility and interviewed some of our customers and staff. High-end game facility open in New Hampshire "A high-end recreational warehouse is all the rage among video game enthusiasts in New Hampshire. NECN's Greg Navarro has more on the virtual technology." Click here to see the clip.

Rock 101 Interview Our own Coolhand was recently interviewed by Rock101. To hear the clip, use the player below Click Here to listen to the clip

FNX FragFest Promotion FNX ran a spot for us to promote the tournaments. To hear it use the player below. Click Here to listen to the clip

NECN Interview with Mike Fortier In September of 2005, NECN interviewed Vice President of Research and Development Mike Fortier. Click here to see the clip.

Telegraph, The (Nashua, NH)
August 4, 2006
Section: Amherst

Put your money where your mouse is

IF YOU GO

Daniel Webster College hosting public gaming competition this weekend

DAVID BROOKS

Telegraph Staff

The HoloDek tournament, featuring Halo 2 on the Xbox and Counterstrike 1.6 on PCs, will run Saturday and Sunday in the Collings Auditorium at Daniel Webster College, 20 University Drive in Nashua. Seeding rounds begin at 10 a.m. and the double elimination tournaments begin at 5 p.m. Tournament entry fees for each day are $20 at the door. Teams can win up to $2,000 in the Counterstrike tournament and $1,000 in Halo 2.

Spectators can attend for free. There will be other games to play on separate computers.

For more information, go to www.holo-dek.com/webster.html .

NASHUA - Robotics, computer games and a tech-friendly college are an obvious mix. Add thousands of dollars in prize money and things get, well, more interesting.

"There are a lot more gamers out there than actually admit it - it's not necessarily just 14-year-old kids - and the money factor really gives it some legitimacy," said Joe Donovan, director of information technology systems at Daniel Webster College.

The school plans to test that legitimacy this weekend by hosting the first of what it hopes will be a regular series of computer- and video-gaming tournaments, with a $2,000 first prize offered to the winning team, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard.

DWC hopes to make a bit of money from computers sitting unused in the summer - "We bought them with gaming specs in mind," said college Chief Information Officer Heidi Crowell - as well as draw some attention to its continuing efforts to expand degree offerings of interest to the tech community, including a new major titled Gaming, Simulation and Robotics.

It may also be a way for a Seacoast robotics firm, hurt by low-cost competition from China, to make itself known in the Nashua area, as it tries to create what might be called the Chuck E. Cheese of the Xbox universe. "We plan to roll out at least 160 facilities around the country, perhaps starting within a year. We hope to be public in a very short period of time . . . with an initial target of $10 million to $15 million," said Kit McKittrick, chief executive officer of Hampton-based HoloDek, which will run the DWC tournament.

HoloDek is an unusual adjunct of a company called Parallel Robotics, which for a decade made robots for the machine tool industry.

"We made a very strong, very fast platform designed, among other things, to cut various metals into parts at very high tolerances," said McKittrick. "When most of the business of machine tooling went to China, we had to reinvent ourselves, selling into the defense, biomedical and entertainment areas."

At HoloDek, the robots operate platforms for gamers, so when their on-screen character moves, their chair moves, too. This has obvious applications with flight simulator software, an area of interest to Daniel Webster College, where 60 percent of the 600 undergraduate day students are in aviation programs. HoloDek has even built something it calls The Sphere, which encases gamers in a mobile, tilting globe. The computer game is projected onto the inside of the sphere, providing a sort of immersive experience.

Even with traditional computers, HoloDek has a lot of experience running what are known as LAN, or local area network, tournaments, usually involving around $6,000 in prizes, at its Hampton facility.

Those tournaments use computers that are directly connected to each other in the same room, rather than being remotely connected over the Internet. This provides faster play and a communal atmosphere for people who enjoy battling their pals via multiplayer games like Halo 2 or Counterstrike.

LAN gaming has been around for a decade or more, but tournament prize money only entered the picture in recent years. There is a small but growing contingent of professional gamers who travel to tournaments around the country, and a New York-based professional league called Major League Gaming has attracted several thousand spectators to watch players sit on a stage and maneuver control pads while the actions of their computerized heroes are displayed on huge screens above them.

And while prize money is new for Daniel Webster College, LAN gaming isn't: The campus has been hosting such get-togethers since 1996.

"Every Saturday night, they're open to students on campus," said Donovan, who added that between 25 and 40 people show up.

There's enough interest that DWC is even trying to set up an inter-college league for gamers - which would be a first in the nation - and it offers non-credit strategy classes for people who want to learn about how to succeed in various games.

The tournament run by HoloDek could raise the level.

"This is kind of a test to see if this will work in this area," Donovan said. "If we could do it every month, we'd love that."

A couple of attempts to establish private, commercial LAN gaming in Nashua have fizzled. The closest is currently Area 51, in a Londonderry shopping mall. McKittrick said HoloDek has thrived, despite being in a faceless industrial park with "negative walk-by traffic," because it has upped the ante, providing a "country-club-type atmosphere" as computer gamers have gotten older and pickier.

With its plan to start a national chain that includes "a retail component, a hospitality component, and a gaming component," HoloDek hopes it can spread that vision.

And even if that doesn't work, McKittrick said having a gaming offshoot has helped Parallel Robotics.

"The robot business has improved as a result of it. The potential buyers get a real kick out of walking through the video-game aspects, and see the application as to how we can really make that robot work very deliberately," he said.

Copyright, 2006, The Telegraph, Nashua, N.H. All Rights Reserved.

Telegraph, The (Nashua, NH)
January 21, 2007
Section: Stocks and Investments

Local area network facilities getting players out of the house

JENN McDOWELL Telegraph Correspondent

NASHUA - Video games aren't just for teenage kids bent on claiming bragging rights anymore. In the last decade, professional gamers have emerged worldwide, making handsome incomes from tournament winnings and endorsements. Colleges across the country have even started offering courses catering to those who hope to break into the "industry" of professional gaming. Local area network (LAN) facilities, such as the Hampton-based Holodek Gaming Theatre, have seen promising growth, as well as increasing popularity as more and more gamers come out of their basements and into the public eye. Holodek is in the beginnings of a nationwide expansion, which will eventually bring a high-tech flight simulator to Daniel Webster College. The company announced the grand opening of two gaming rooms at DWC during a LAN Counterstrike 1.6 tournament held in the Collings Auditorium at the college in November.

The permanent gaming rooms are at the Eaton-Richmond Center, in the same building as Collings, where students and community members alike have begun to either hone or discover their computer and console gaming abilities for $6 an hour for community members and $4.50 for students.

The facility dovetails with a new major DWC is offering, Gaming, Simulation and Robotics, as well as with the aviation programs that account for about 60 percent of the college's day students.

Holodek CEO Kit McKittrick said they're working with Synergy Retail, the same company that helped Home Depot expand on a national level, to add well over a hundred new LAN locations around the country.

"We're quite positive that if we put those locations around the country, we would not cannibalize our own customers by taking them from one location to another," he said.

Some of these facilities will be newly constructed, he said, while others will be created within rental space - particularly space available on college campuses, such as the facility at DWC.

McKittrick said they're working with a number of movie theater chains, such as National Amusements, to rent space for the facilities."We're pretty close with a number of different people; we just have to finalize contracts," said McKittrick, who expects the expansion will be well under way within a year. Each new facility will cost between $1 million and $3 million to get started, but McKittrick said each one has the potential to generate revenue in the hundreds of millions.

McKittrick said the new facility at DWC has served as an indicator of how the gaming rooms will be received nationally, particularly in the company's target audience: males between the ages of 18 and 35.

He said it has also given them the opportunity to troubleshoot any unforeseen problems that would arise during the expansion.

"The one at DWC has really enabled us to learn the college market and also to work out the various operation issues that come up," particularly with converting college computer education resource centers into gaming rooms, McKittrick said.

DWC was chosen for its technologically advanced campus as well as for its need for hands-on robotics and aviation applications.

"Daniel Webster has consistently tried to be innovative in various areas, and they were, I think, the very first college-sponsored video gaming guild in the country," he said. "These guys are leading edge as far as not only the technology, but also the application of the technology."

McKittrick said he plans to further expand the DWC facility, which will include the installation of a robotic platform that will interface with Microsoft's flight simulator software.

"We will have a world-class flight simulator that provides many of the features of a full-motion flight simulator, which would cost millions of dollars," he said. "We're going to do it for a fraction of that cost." Changes in the gaming industry have led to positive growth, McKittrick said. "The biggest change is that I believe that we have come to a tipping point, where video gaming has become a sport," he said.

According to McKittrick, gaming is one of the fastest-growing spectator sports in the world, particularly in the Pacific Rim.

"It's like watching the birth of another large sports industry," he said, comparing the growth to that seen in sports such as tennis, golf and even football. "There are more participants in video gaming than there is in any other sport."

McKittrick said the typical gamer is a 30-year-old male who makes an average of $60,000 a year and spends his discretionary funds on games and gaming consoles.

He added that women have begun joining the gaming ranks.

"Women are absolutely getting involved," he said. "Our experience is very much predominantly male. However, we are beginning to see a lot of females who are becoming interested in their own games."

McKittrick also said the baby boomer generation has started to become involved in gaming.

"You're going to see a significant increase in the over-50 population playing these games," he said.

Check out Holodek's Web site, www.holo-dek.com, for the DWC facility's hours.

Copyright, 2007, The Telegraph, Nashua, N.H. All Rights Reserved.

Telegraph, The (Nashua, NH)
January 4, 2007
Section: Michael Brindley

It's not all fun and games. There's learning, too Professor Thomas Goulding doesn't want parents to get the wrong idea when they find out their children are playing roulette and blackjack in class. "We're not asking your children to come here and play games," said Goulding, chair of the computer science division at Daniel Webster College in Nashua. "We're asking them to come here and develop complex games and software." It is part of the freshman-year curriculum for a new degree - gaming, simulation and robotics. The games students are playing are their class projects, developed in teams, said Goulding, chair of the college's computer science program.

"To get them doing that kind of work after three or four months here is amazing," he said, sitting in his office at the college Wednesday. Although the school is known primarily for its aviation program, Goulding said the new program has been popular among students, and now, with the financial backing of Microsoft, it will now be a model for other schools across the country.

Last month, Goulding found out that he was one of six applicants to receive an $80,000 computer gaming curriculum grant from the computer giant. The college's board of trustees added another $13,000, on top of the grant. The money will be used to package and distribute Goulding's curriculum to other colleges looking to improve upon or start their own computer gaming program.

"It's a big feather in the cap for the college," said the 61-year-old Goulding, who has been with the college since 2000. Since about that time, there has been a sharp decline - about 70 percent - in the number of students entering computer sciences at the college level.

Goulding said the new degree was designed to attract students into the program, and get them ready for real-world experience, whether it is working in military defense, aviation, or whatever field they choose. "The degree puts our students in the mainstream," he said. "You've gotta get them functioning at a high level right away. They respond to that." Alfred Thompson, academic relations manager for Microsoft, said Goulding's proposal was selected from more than 70 submissions from across North America. What made Goulding's stand out was the advanced work that he had freshmen doing in the game development classes, said Thompson.

In the second semester of their freshmen year, students are already developing casino-style games, which Goulding said are just as advanced and easy-to-use as those sold on the market."There are literally thousands of lines of code in here," he said, as he showed an example of student work on his office computer.

Thompson said the decline in computer science students is concerning to companies like Microsoft, which rely so heavily on young, talented computer science majors coming out of college into the work force, he said. Three years ago, Microsoft designed the grant program as a way for colleges exchange ideas on designing computer gaming curriculum to get students back into the profession.

"It's time-consuming and expensive to develop curriculum," said Thompson. "This makes it available to schools, contributing to the whole infrastructure." Goulding spent most of his career in the corporate world, but took an adjunct position at Daniel Webster College after he retired. He quickly became head of the computer science division.

He admits however that he has been probably more busy now than he ever was when he was working.

"I've been traveling, and speaking at academic conferences," he said. "I use corporate management techniques in conjunction with the gaming techniques." The college began promoting its new gaming and robotics degree last year, and enrolled 15 students this year, and Goulding expects that number to double next year.

The college has relationships with Robotech, based in Nashua, and Hampton-based HoloDek Gaming, a defense contractor and gaming innovator. A HoloDek gaming facility has already opened at the college.

Goulding's goal is to make Daniel Webster College the premier school for game development on the east coast. Goulding is also a pilot, and said that computer science, game development and design, and aviation all go hand-in-hand. "We're creating high-powered computer science graduates," he said.

Copyright, 2007, The Telegraph, Nashua, N.H. All Rights Reserved.