Game Engines for Urban Exploration: Bridging Science Narrative for Broader Participants

One aspect of playing is exploration. A playable city could therefore be regarded as an explorable city. In recent years, a growing number of urban exploration tools have been developed, empowered by the technology of game engines. Traditionally, game engines have been used to create virtual environments for entertainment and enable the user to explore. We seek to apply game engines in urban planning beyond the visualization of buildings, trees, traffic, or people in the city. It can become a tool for a multidisciplinary approach that involves engineers, scientists, architects, planners, and even the citizens themselves. Those kind of mixed stakeholders have quite diverse needs, which all can be addressed by game engines in an easy way. In this chapter, we look toward bridging the seen and unseen elements in a collaborative game environment. One of the less visible elements in urban environment involves the urban microclimate: heat emission, wind flows, and outdoor thermal comfort. These unseen scientific elements have become a narrative on their own on top of the urban exploration. If they are to be presented in the traditional way of scientific visualization, the connection to the built environment would be difficult to understand for many kinds of stakeholders, especially the nonscientists. Hence, we utilize the power of the Unity3D game engine to show the potential of collaborative and explorative virtual environments: a bottom-up citizen design science within the narrative of exploration and urban science data.