Rapid 3D Reconstruction of Indoor Environments to Generate Virtual Reality Serious Games Scenarios

Virtual Reality (VR) for Serious Games (SGs) is attracting increasing attention for training applications due to its potential to provide significantly enhanced learning to users. Some examples of the application of VR for SGs are complex training evacuation problems such as indoor earthquake evacuation or fire evacuation. The indoor 3D geometry of existing buildings can largely influence evacuees' behaviour, being instrumental in the design of VR SGs storylines and simulation scenarios. The VR scenarios of existing buildings can be generated from drawings and models. However, these data may not reflect the 'as-is' state of the indoor environment and may not be suitable to reflect dynamic changes of the system (e.g. Earthquakes), resulting in excessive development efforts to design credible and meaningful user experience. This paper explores several workflows for the rapid and effective reconstruction of 3D indoor environments of existing buildings that are suitable for earthquake simulations. These workflows start from Building Information Modelling (BIM), laser scanning and 360-degree panoramas. We evaluated the feasibility and efficiency of different approaches by using an earthquake-based case study developed for VR SGs.