If there was ever any doubt that virtual worlds have a place in architectural practice and education, this month’s special issue of ITcon presents a staggering amount of content that is sure to help promote the use of virtual worlds and game engines within AEC industries and beyond.
The Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon) is a peer-reviewed scholarly publication recently published a special issue dedicated to the use of virtual world technology in architecture, civil engineering and facility management.
“Virtual worlds, which are similar to the computer games with which they share technology, take their participants called residents to new places beyond the physical and geographic limitations of the real world. Residents become producers of content in the virtual world, designing and developing the environment around their own interests. This virtual world technology can offer significant benefits for AEC disciplines from 3D walkthroughs, interactive visualization, through virtual collaboration, design and planning to education, and training. The special issue is aimed to provide insights into the use of virtual world technology in AEC and includes seven papers with authors representing institutions in Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, UK, and the USA.”
The papers are all free to review, published with open access distributed under creative commons license, so be sure to check out this incredible resource.
Here are a few snippets taken from their summaries – just to provide a sampling of what you can expect to find in this issue:
“This paper investigates the innovative use of emerging multiuser virtual world technologies for supporting human-human collaboration and human-computer co-creativity in design.” (link)
“This paper presents the concept of Building interactive Modeling (BiM) which complements the capabilities of BIM with social interaction to enhance collaborative information and knowledge sharing. Role-playing scenarios developed in Second Life demonstrate specific opportunities of BiM.” (link)
“…study of design collaboration in the CyberGRID (Cyber-enabled Global Research Infrastructure for Design), a virtual collaborative space developed in Second Life to support design work in global virtual networks. (link)
“This paper will bring evidence to bear that suggests the value in using Virtual Environments (VE’s) is in their potential to facilitate collaboration … scrutinize design and construction in the VE Second Life.” (link)
“The paper presents potential utilization of Second Life© (SL) in enhancing learning/training construction project management.” (link)
“The research potential of Second Life in construction: the whole life cycle costing example.” (link)
