The use of detailed building plans and models is common in the construction management domain. Also there is increasing interest in the reuse of such models to realize 3D interactive virtual environments to aid model refinement and for use as training environments, for example virtual site visits. Unfortunately, the development of interactive virtual environments is both time consuming and technically difficult. One successful approach is the reuse of gaming technology to provide the underlying virtual environment and to allow developers to focus on importing appropriate content, e.g. building geometry and textures. Building Information Modelling (BIM) provides a rich source of building data and is an ideal basis for constructing realistic virtual environments. This paper overviews the conversion from BIM to game engines and specifically from the BIM tool Revit to the Unity3D game engine in a case study.
Soft skills such as effective communication are becoming increasingly important for engineering graduates. Employers prize excellent written and oral abilities and literacy proficiency. High levels of academic literacy can significantly improve students' success in their university study. Traditional approaches to literacy improvement can limit student engagement. However, mobile learning and the use of smart phone apps present new opportunities to support literacy education. This paper describes current work exploring the use of apps, as serious games, to improve literacy in undergraduate students and outlines initial results from a cross-discipline evaluation of an m-learning literacy app.
The goal of the City Evolutions Project is to establish interactive systems and games to entertain users. Because of the existing variabilities in the system and potential reuse for similar systems in this domain, the software system is designed and developed in a reuse-based way, i.e. Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE). SPLE is a reuse-based software approach with reusable software assets in order to maximise software reuse. In SPLE, it is very important to maintain the requirement traceability from software family establishment to individual product derivation. In this paper, we describe our experience of applying SPLE approach in the City Evolutions project and propose an approach to enhance the requirements traceability in SPLE.
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