The UJI designs a 3D virtual reality video game to promote smart cities



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## The UJI designs a 3D virtual reality video game to promote smart cities

03/04/2018 |
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The Universitat Jaume I (UJI) has designed a 3D virtual reality video game to promote the potential of smart cities. The researchers from the Institute of New Imaging Technologies of the UJI Francisco Ramos, Nacho Miralles and Sonia Gil have created the app "Smart Beetles", a project whose results have been published in the Workshop on Open Data for Open Cities and Geogames in the Conference on Geoinformation Science held in Wageningen (The Netherlands).

The Smart Beetles app aims to create a playful tool for people to know where the services of a city are located. To do this, researchers have built a video game that proposes a mission as simple as keeping the streets clean, through different levels of play. The proposal has been implemented using Unity3D, OpenStreetMaps and ESRI City Engine. It has had the collaboration of the company Pixelder.com.

This video game requires a specific design for each city where it has to be implanted. "The first prototype of Smart Beetles has modelled the city of San Diego, since we presented the project in this town, in the ESRI User Conference", explains Francisco Ramos, lecturer of the Department of Computer Languages ​​and Systems of the UJI. Currently, the first version of the game can be downloaded freely on App Store and on Google Play, while researchers are working on integrating services in real time.

Smart Beetles promotes smart cities because "it allows to know the services offered by a city through play; in this way, its use is enhanced in a more intelligent way by citizens", according to Ramos. In addition, this app presents technological innovations relevant to science, as is the case of the integration of data from the city with the video game engine.

Smart cities are growing and their main justification relies on performance and efficiency. “With this type of video game, we expect that the educational and play aspects will gain more weight in this environment", says Ramos. "We do not want cities to be only more efficient; we work so that, in addition, they are more fun”, he adds.

Francisco Ramos is a lecturer in the Department of Languages ​​and Computer Systems of the UJI. His lines of research include virtual and augmented reality, real-time graphics and GIS. He received an extraordinary doctorate award for his thesis in 2008 and is currently director of the Master’s Degree in Mobile Programming and lecturer in the Erasmus Mundus Master's Degree in Geospatial Technologies. In addition, he is a co-founder of Emotional-apps.com and an external consultant at Pixelder.com.

On his behalf, Nacho Miralles is a predoctoral student in the Geotec group, and his research focuses on the application of geospatial technologies to the field of mental health. However, he has always been interested in role-playing games and video games, as a consumer in the beginning and as a developer for a few years. For that reason, he tries to add components of the gamer scope to the developments and investigations in which he is involved.

iOS download: <http://smartbeetles.com/ios>

Android download: <http://smartbeetles.com/android>

*F. Ramos, N. Miralles. Smart Beetles: Towards A Geogame for Smart Citizens. In Workshop on Open Data for Open Cities and Geogames. AGILE. International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2017. ISSN 1613-0073.  Vol. 1952. pp 36-38.* [*http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1952/*](http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1952/)

*F. Ramos, N. Miralles, C. Andres.* *EDUCATING CHILDREN IN SMART CITIES BY USING A VIDEOGAME, INTED2017 Proceedings. ISSN: 2340-1079, p. 5612. DOI:* [*http://dx.doi.org/10.21125/inted.2017.1306*](http://dx.doi.org/10.21125/inted.2017.1306)

*F. Ramos, I. Miralles, C. Andres. PEDAGOGY AND VIDEOGAMES: THE SERIOUS GAMES AGE, EDULEARN17 Proceedings.* *ISSN 2340-1117, p. 4164. DOI:* [*http://dx.doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2017.1895*](http://dx.doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2017.1895)

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