Using game engines for marine visualisation and collaboration

Game engines at their core are modular and expandable sets of software components which allow for creation of a huge variety of different projects. Many provide the basic tools for three dimensional visualisations, networking between users, simple control schemes using keyboard and mouse or game controllers, data storage, even vocal and textual communication within the environment. While the primary purpose of these packages is for making video games for entertainment, more and more people are seeing the value of these tools in creation of more “serious” applications. These “serious games” have been focused on areas such as education and training in recent years, but there is room for expansion of game engines into the areas of visualisation and collaborative work environments. Multiplayer games are often inherently collaborative environments, forcing users to work together to reach some end goal. By using the framework provided by these games, we can more easily create a virtual workspace which can visualise real world data and problems, and allow distributed users to discuss and collaborate on potential solutions. In this paper, we discuss our development of a simple system which creates visualisations of surface current data in a 3D recreation of Galway Bay. The end goal of the system is to provide a virtual environment that will allow distributed groups of users to visualise and discuss datasets, and collaboratively come to decisions in more efficient and informed ways.