After Angry Birds, another mobile game-- Big Ears-- from the stable of Finnish game developer Peter Vesterbacka has arrived. Big Ears has been developed by Big Ear Games, a company in which Vesterbacka is involved.

Big Ears is on a soft launch on app stores, It is a music- learning game that allows users to create original musical messages and ringtones.

“The app gamifies the art of learning music. It lets the users to collect instruments to play with and make music with composing tools,” he said. The fifty-year-old techie, who was instrumental in the creation of Angry Birds, which was a rage among mobile game lovers, has big plans for India.

Big Plans for India

Vesterbacka is looking at establishing a university to impart education on artificial intelligence, besides helping start-ups and teaching school kids the art of game development.

He was in Hyderabad last week in connection with signing two agreements Malaxmi group — one on setting up the university and the other on building a platform for start-ups to scale up operations.

“We are going to start our operations in a few months, not in years. We will start academic activities in temporary premises with about 100 students each in artificial intelligence and gaming streams,” he said.

He has plans to ramp up soon the numbers to 1,000 each . “Ultimately, our goal is to have a strength of 50,000 students in the university after 10 years,” Vesterbacka said.

To quickly roll out the academic programmes in the university, he would take the help of academic institutes in Finland. “We don’t need to start everything from the scratch. We have a lot of expertise in artificial intelligence and gaming in our country,” he said.

The university will have diverse activities, including training of teachers.

The first thing that attracted the attention of the Finnish serial entrepreneur in India is the stark difference between the education systems of the two countries.

“We have short school days. Perhaps, our schools are the best in the world. But in India the teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world. This is not acceptable,” he said, pointing out at the need to have better schooling options.

Vesterbacka, however, is not decided yet on where to locate the university. “We are in talks with several State governments, including Telangana and Andhra Pradesh,” he said.

Meanwhile, Vesterbacka has agreed to join a Telangana government initiative to teach the art of game development to students in their holidays and vacation.

He also agreed to be an adviser to the Telangana VFX Animation Gaming Association (TVAGA).

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