SENIOR PSYGNOSIS/PLAYSTATION EXEC SETS UP MIDDLEWARE COMPANY

John Bickley, who joined Psygnosis founders Hetherington and Ellis in 1992, and helped them sell the company to SONY in 1993, and build Psygnosis into Europes largest video games developer and publisher during the '90s has set up Genemation, a face synthesis middleware company, which is developing powerful face synthesis and animation tools that will be supplied to digital content creators in the video games, feature film, TV post production, web authoring and advertising sectors.

John Bickley, who joined Psygnosis founders Hetherington and Ellis in 1992, and helped them sell the company to SONY in 1993, and build Psygnosis into Europes largest developer and publisher during the '90s has set up Genemation, a face synthesis middleware company, which is developing powerful face synthesis and animation tools that will be supplied to digital content creators in the video games, feature film, TV post production, web authoring and advertising sectors.

Genemations tools will allow digital artists to create and animate 2D/3D faces and heads of their bespoke characters, e.g. licenses. However, Genemations tools enable the creation of thousands of photo realistic faces and heads without the need for source material, i.e. actors, models, or stock photography. This powerful aspect of the tool will significantly reduce time and money spent on sourcing, capturing and processing such data; and to avoid potential copyright issues and recurring royalty payments

Genemations tools will empower artists and studios to massively improve art pipeline productivity in the area of face creation and animation through its innovative batch processing engine, at a time when developers are facing massive cost and time to market pressures; with Ps3 and Xbox 2 development 'just around the corner these pressures will only increase. At the recent San Jose Games Developers Conference, developers discussed the need to improve video games storylines and characterisation; and consumers are expecting more realistic looking characters, particularly with licensed titles. These combined demands, which will rise with next generation hardware, will increase pressure on developers in the area of face synthesis.

The timing of the launch of Genemation and the development of its tools coincides with the games industry increasingly recognising the benefits of middleware and the need to streamline production processes. At the recent ELSPA (European Leisure Software Publishers Association) Games Summit senior industry execs, including Electronic Arts European managing director Gerhard Florin, alluded to the need for the industry to increase efficiencies, and in the area of game development utilise middleware to improve productivity.

Genemation is a commercial spin out from Manchester Universitys Imaging Science & Biomedical Engineering division (ISBE), which is one of the worlds leading academic institutions in 'machine vision. Key staff from ISBE are shareholders and full time employees.

Manchester University has a long history of innovation highlighted most notably by Alan Turings work back in the 1940s to invent the first computation machine, which effectively became the basis of modern computing.

Genemation is privately owned and based in Manchester. Its first face synthesis tools will be launched in Q3, 2003.

John Bickley can be contacted on +44 (0) 161 275 5139, +44 (0) 7747 048065 and john@genemation.com

More details about the company can be found on its website: http://www.genemation.com. A Beta evaluation version of its tool can be downloaded from the site.

JOHN BICKLEY biog

In the '70s and early '80s Bickley worked for EMI Records and Universal Music in sales and marketing. Whilst at Universal Music in 1980 Bickley was a member of the management team tasked with launching CIC Video, a joint venture between Universal Pictures and Paramount Studios, set up to capitalise on the emerging video market. Bickley went on to become managing director of CIC Video, significantly growing revenue and taking it to market dominance for the duration of his tenure. He oversaw such major video hits as Beverly Hills Cop, Fatal Attraction, ET, The Extra Terrestrial, The Untouchables, and the Indiana Jones and Back to The Future trilogies. In '92 he joined Psygnosis, then a privately owned computer and video games development and publishing company. Bickley helped the founders sell the company to SONY in 1993 and was instrumental in building the company into an international operation and becoming Europes largest developer and publisher during the mid '90s. Psygnosis had a massive international hit with Lemmings in 1992/3 and kick started the launch of PlayStation in Europe with the day and date launch with the hardware of the seminal Wipeout and Destruction Derby. In '96 the launch of Formula One '95 was a European wide hit that firmly established the PlayStation as the console of choice and was the first million selling software title. Towards the end of the '90s Bickley was responsible for re-structuring Psygnosis and reversing it into SCEE. Bickley then worked for at SCEE focussing on the European publishing business. In 2001 Bickley joined a technology start-up in Oxford which raised 20million during a very difficult downturn in the stock market. He joined Genemation as CEO in January 2003 and is a major shareholder.