Emerging applications of immersive virtual technologies are providing architects and designers with powerful interactive environments for virtual design collaboration, which has been particularly beneficial since 2020 while the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry has experienced an acceleration of remote working. However, there is currently a lack of critical understanding about both the theoretical and technical development of immersive virtual environments (ImVE) for supporting architectural design collaboration. This paper reviewed recent research (since 2010) relating to the topic in a systematic literature review (SLR). Through the four steps of identification, screening, eligibility check, and inclusion of the eligible articles, in total, 29 journal articles were reviewed and discussed from 3 aspects: ImVE in the AEC industry, ImVE for supporting virtual collaboration, and applications of ImVE to support design collaboration. The results of this review suggest that future research and technology development are needed in the following areas: (1) ImVE support for design collaboration, particularly at the early design stage; (2) cognitive research about design collaboration in ImVE, toward the adoption of more innovative and comprehensive methodologies; (3) further enhancements to ImVE technologies to incorporate more needed advanced design features.

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A Systematic Review of Architectural Design Collaboration in Immersive Virtual Environments

This article examines level design processes and challenges at professional game studios. Thematic analysis of data, recorded through field studies and semi-structured interviews, identify four key themes: level design as an interdisciplinary effort; who is the level designer; the role of narrative in level design; and challenges of managing creativity in the level design process. Results indicate that while the role called level designer is often assigned to specific disciplines, the process of level design is usually highly interdisciplinary. Furthermore, this interdisciplinary collaboration requires management to maintain both creativity and efficient pipelines, by distributing ownership and facilitating communication and planning. The level design process seems particularly vulnerable to suboptimal interdisciplinary communication and planning, due to significant reliance on narrative design, game design, art, sound design, and tool development. While this article addresses level design specifically, most observations are comparable to previous findings on game development in general.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/15554120221139229

Level Design Processes and Challenges: A Cross Section of Game Development

With the gradual improvement of the quality of life, taste, and ecological and environmental awareness of urban residents in China, the environmental landscape of residential areas has gradually become a hot spot. At present, the level of the residential environmental landscape has become a necessary means for real estate developers to publicize products and improve economic benefits. Although many residential areas have invested a high cost in constructing environmental landscapes, there are always some deficiencies and defects in the design and implementation of environmental landscapes in residential areas due to various reasons. Therefore, to ameliorate the low efficiency and high cost of manual processing of landscape images, a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) model based on the traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is designed for semantic segmentation of landscape images to deal with the excessive amount of landscape elements in landscape image processing. The deconvolution method is utilized to realize pixel-level semantic segmentation. Besides, the image preprocessing method enhances the data to prevent overfitting from commonly occurring in FCN. Moreover, the model two-stage training method ameliorates long training time and complex convergence in deep learning. Finally, three upsampling network structures, i.e., FCN-32s, FCN-16s, and FCN-8s, are selected for a comparative experiment to determine the most suitable network. The experimental results demonstrate that the FCN-8s upsampling network structure is the most prominent; it attains a pixel accuracy of more than 90%, an average accuracy of 88%, and an average Image Understanding of 75%. The three values are the highest among the three upsampling structures, indicating that the FCN-8s can realize accurate landscape image processing. Besides, the recognition accuracy of FCN for landscape elements reaches 90%, 25% higher than that of CNN. This method is effective and accurate in classifying landscape elements, improves the classification accuracy intelligently, and significantly reduces the cost of landscape element classification, which is feasible.

https://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/wcmc/2022/7387363.pdf

Design and Implementation of Fully Convolutional Network Algorithm in Landscape Image Processing

Overlay Design Methodology for virtual environment design within digital games

People have started spending time with digital tools and virtual worlds to escape reality's horrors. However, designed spaces are more than the players' needs, especially those digital games that their stories involve urban environments. This inefficiency causes spending futile efforts both in time and cost for the digital games' productions; The urban environments in these digital games are replicas of real-world cities. Some companies use some techniques for downgrading replicas. Therefore, this study aims to uncover the used techniques for designing Tom Clancy's The Division (2016). By using reverse engineering methodology and qualitative comparative analysis, the in-game map compared with the real-world map. Based on the results, the used techniques allowed the designers to scale down the game environment to be 2.5 times smaller than the actual city. Rather, verisimilitude is achieved by combining sufficiently accurate elements to give the impression of complete accuracy. By implementing the results of this research, designers can develop smaller replicas to be perceived as more extensive. 

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Ikhwan Kim

Papers

Overlay Design Methodology for virtual environment design within digital games

Urban design analysis of new york city’s virtual model - the case of tom clancy’s the division

Virtual Landscape Classification Standards and Representative Spatial Types in Digital Games