Abstract
It is important when making 3D virtual cities for virtual reality (VR) that they perform well as a “break in presence” (BIP) might occur when the FPS becomes too low. The key contributions of this research paper are a performance analysis that checks whether two separate virtual cities are “VR ready” on a recommended specification system to qualify for the Oculus Store (i.e., applications must meet a consistent 90 frames per second (FPS)) and several guidelines that are important when rendering large virtual cities for VR. Both virtual cities (Endless City Driver versions) without pedestrians and parked vehicles (but with foliage in the case of the next generation) are VR ready. Reducing the city tile size by half resulted in a much better performance in general.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Oculus Rift and Rift S minimum requirements and system specifications are given in https://support.oculus.com/248749509016567/.
- 2.
The first author.
- 3.
For the ECD TOV this was not easily possible as the tiles were handmade, and the tiles do not fit together anymore if cropped.
- 4.
The tiles should be large enough so that the end of the world is not easily visible.
- 5.
For example, in the video game Grand Theft Auto V the cities were made by human artists which leads to high realism but also means a lot of time and effort in comparison to PCG content. “Los Angeles was extensively researched for the game. The team organised field research trips with tour guides and architectural historians, and captured around 250,000 photographs and many hours of video footage.” (Wikipedia Contributors, 2020).
References
Boes, J., Sanza, C., & Sanchez, S. (2012). Intuitive Method for Pedestrians in Virtual Environments. In D. Plemenos & G. Miaoulis (Eds.), Intelligent computer graphics 2011, Studies in computational intelligence (Vol. 374, pp. 117–137). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
Bouloukakis, M., Partarakis, N., Drossis, I., Kalaitzakis, M., & Stephanidis, C. (2019). Virtual reality for smart city visualization and monitoring. In Mediterranean cities and Island communities (pp. 1–18). Springer.
Code Stage. (n.d.). Advanced FPS counter. Retrieved February 15, 2020, from https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/advanced-fps-counter-14656
Gaisbauer, W., & Hlavacs, H. (2017). Procedural attack! Procedural generation for populated virtual cities: A survey. International Journal of Serious Games, 4(2), 19–29.
Gaisbauer, W., Prohaska, J., Schweinitzer, U., & Hlavacs, H. (2020). Endless city driver: procedural generation of realistic populated virtual 3D city environment. In Augmented reality and virtual reality, augmented reality and virtual reality: Changing realities in a dynamic world (Vol. 4, pp. 171–184). Cham: Springer, Cham.
Gretzel, U., Zhong, L., & Koo, C. (2016). Application of smart tourism to cities. International Journal of Tourism Cities (Emerald Group Publishing Limited).
Greuter, S., Parker, J., Stewart, N., & Leach, G. (2003). Real-time procedural generation of “Pseudo Infinite” cities (pp. 87–ff). In Presented at the Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Australasia and South East Asia. New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Heeter, C. (1992). BeingThere: The subjective experience of presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 1(2), 262–271 (MIT Press).
Hendrikx, M., Meijer, S., Van Der Velden, J., & Iosup, A. (2013). Procedural content generation for games: A survey. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 9(1), 1:1–1:22. New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Ingram, R., Benford, S., & Bowers, J. (1996). Building virtual cities: applying urban planning principles to the design of virtual environments. In Presented at the VRST’96: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (pp. 83–91), ACM Press.
Lv, Z., Yin, T., Zhang, X., Song, H., & Chen, G. (2016). Virtual reality smart city based on WebVRGIS. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 3(6), 1015–1024 (IEEE).
Maleki, S. (2019). Rendering a new world: Lucasfilm advanced development group. XRDS, 26(1), 62–63. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery.
Oculus Developer Center. (n.d.). Guidelines for VR performance optimization. Retrieved February 2, 2020, from https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/native/pc/dg-performance-guidelines/
Oliveira, W., Gaisbauer, W., Tizuka, M., Clua, E., & Hlavacs, H. (2018). Virtual and real body experience comparison using mixed reality cycling environment. In E. Clua, L. Roque, A. Lugmayr, & P. Tuomi (Eds.) Presented at the Entertainment Computing—ICEC 2018 (Vol. 11112, pp. 52–63). Cham: Springer.
Peng, C., Tan, X., Gao, M., & Yao, Y. (2013). Virtual reality in smart city. In Geo-informatics in resource management and sustainable ecosystem (pp. 107–118). Springer.
Slater, M., & Steed, A. (2000). A virtual presence counter. Presence, 9, 413–434.
Smelik, R. M., Tutenel, T., Bidarra, R., & Benes, B. (2014). A survey on procedural modelling for virtual worlds. Computer Graphics Forum, 33(6), 31–50.
Watson, B., Müller, P., Veryovka, O., Fuller, A., Wonka, P., & Sexton, C. (2008). Procedural urban modeling in practice. IEEE computer graphics and applications, 28(3), 18–26.
Wikipedia Contributors. (2020). Development of grand theft auto V—Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Development_of_Grand_Theft_Auto_V&oldid=969256538. Retrieved August 4, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Development_of_Grand_Theft_Auto_V&oldid=969256538
Yersin, B., Maïm, J., Pettré, J., & Thalmann, D. (2009). Crowd patches: populating large-scale virtual environments for real-time applications. In Presented at the Proceedings of the 2009 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (pp. 207–214). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendix
Appendix
See Figs. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.
The look and feel of 100 pedestrians spawned in a radius of 100 m while driving through the city in Endless City Driver (TOV)
Pedestrians at night while driving through the city in Endless City Driver (TOV)
Bird’ s-eye view of the pedestrians spawned around the car (little dots) in Endless City Driver (TOV)
The main menu of Endless City Driver (TOV)
The look and feel of the randomly parked vehicles while driving through the city in Endless City Driver (TNG). Early feedback was that the city looks like a postapocalyptic ghost town and to counteract that we added the randomly parked vehicles, which also increases the presence (“feeling of being there”) for the user
Bird’ s-eye view of the procedurally generated randomly parked vehicles in the Endless City Driver (TNG). There are 4200 vehicles present in the 6 × 6 city tiles, which is computationally expensive but adds to the realism and presence of the living city, avoiding a ghost town. This image represents only a subarea of one city tile with 15 city blocks visible and the parked vehicles around each city block (coloured spots) with a part of the river seen on the right flowing from the top to the bottom
Some pedestrians are walking on the sidewalks using the improved pedestrian system from (Gaisbauer et al., 2020). A sprawling and living city wsith pedestrians walking randomly around and randomly parked vehicles also including foliage was the goal of the ECD TNG project to convey the “feeling of being there” (i.e., presence) for a visitor
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gaisbauer, W., Prohaska, J., Schweinitzer, U., Hlavacs, H. (2021). Making 3D Virtual Cities VR Ready: A Performance Study. In: tom Dieck, M.C., Jung, T.H., Loureiro, S.M.C. (eds) Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68086-2_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68086-2_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-68085-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-68086-2
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)