The massification and webification of systems' modeling and simulation with virtual worlds

ABSTRACT

General-purpose virtual world platforms are having a surprising effect in the old practice of systems modeling and simulation: its massification and webification. A visit to any virtual place in Second Life-like worlds shows sophisticated virtual constructions with non-trivial dynamic behavior that have been set up by ordinary people who neither used professional 3D modeling and simulation tools, nor consider themselves as programmers. Many of those virtual constructions are imaginary systems that could not survive the laws of physics. However, more and more people are experimenting with these virtual worlds to model, simulate and visualize real-world systems, for a number of purposes: historical reconstruction, rich 3D interfaces to physical equipment control, urban planning, and scientific visualizations are just a few. This gives an overview of all this experimentation, and analyzes the ways by which it improves the state-of-the-art professional tools. It also presents some of the engineering and software engineering challenges that this practice brings to the table.

REFERENCES

• 1: A. Henckel and C. Lopes. Stellarsim: A plug-in architecture for scientific visualizations in virtual worlds. In International Conference on Facets of Virtual Environments, Berlin, Germany, July 2009.
• 2: C. Lopes, L. Kan, A. Popov, and R. Morla. PRT simulation in an immersive virtual world. In SIMUTools 2008, First International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques for Communications, Networks and Systems, Marseille, France, Mar. 2008

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING
      I.6.7 Simulation Support Systems

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
3d visualization, modeling, simulation, virtual worlds