We just got word that Havok's co-founder spoke at an Irish university and talked about their next generation physics engine. Kotaku reader Conor was there and took copious notes.

Read Conor's full report after the jump.

Steven Collins, co-founder of Havok (physics engine for Halo 2, Half-Life 2, etc.), is back as a lecturer at my college now (in Dublin, Ireland), and he gave a talk today about the physics of computer games. He showed some new impact/collision stuff that was pretty amazing, including a rubber duck (read "PS3") one where over 1,500 ducks were fired simultaneously at a large building, which was destroyed incredibly realistically, all in real-time. They've done some new impact stuff that's pretty amazing. He talked a lot about character physics too, a lot about having more dynamic movement- feet actually standing on a surface rather than gliding along, all that. The most impressive stuff was a soldier walking up and down and across stairs with each football landing properly on a step, or a soldier jumping into a wall of boxes and reacting completely realistically to the impact. Another really good bit was when he ran the soldier into a wall so that it just clipped his shoulder which bounced back while he kept running... it looked perfect. Someone asked about dedicated physics processing units but he said it wasn't something that they were considering right now, but that if a major developer asked them to support something like that, they would. And... he mentioned something about their physics engine being given to developers for the PS3 too.