Procedural Virtual Worlds

“Going Procedural”

In the last few years, the use of algorithms to automatically generate virtual reality environments has become an effective solution for the production of digital content. In fact, the idea of automatically recreating environments with very little modelling effort is a fascinating idea that can lead to several benefits in different areas including virtual worlds (a few other examples include architecture, video games and movies). The goal is to place all, or most of the effort, of creating an environment in computer software. This means that the time spent by human resources, such as computer modellers or even a plain virtual world user who wants to create their own models, would be significantly reduced and their time may be used on more useful tasks.

The creation of virtual environments via an algorithm (instead of manually) is often identified as “generation” of virtual environments. Similarly, the set of techniques which rely on algorithms to generate these environments are often referred to as “procedural modelling” techniques. Although there are diverse techniques used in procedural modelling, such as grammar based techniques (e.g. L-systems¹), fractals² and generative modelling³, the general purpose of these is similar: apply parameterised algorithms to produce 3D virtual scenes. The result is to create 3D models or textures from user choices rather than manually modelling each of the environment features.