Archinect - News

Carlo Ratti Associati team creates ‘world’s largest board game’ at Milan Design Week

2023-04-27T10:55:00-04:00

A team comprising Carlo Ratti Associati, Italo Rota, Eni, and Blob Factory Gaming have presented an installation at Milan Design Week which transformed Milan’s Botanical Garden into a 37,000-square-foot interactive game. Titled ‘Walk the Talk,’ the board game saw over 400 energy-harvesting luminescent tiles form multiple pathways and crossroads across the landscape, engaging players in what the team calls “a discourse underlying the future of mobility.”

Image credit: Marco Beck Peccoz

The installation has been structured as a “metaphorical stroll around Milan” featuring the city’s major landmarks. Each of the 400 wooden tiles and 32 types of icons represents either an obstacle or a solution to the game’s theme of urban mobility, from traffic to public transportation and electric car sharing. Working either alone or in groups, players navigate throughout the ‘city’ by finding solutions to challenges such as overcrowded neighborhoods or a lack of pedestrian areas.

Image credit: Marco B...

Florida International University to develop virtual reality games for training future AEC workers thanks to NSF grant

2023-03-27T12:06:00-04:00

Florida International University (FIU) has been awarded a grant to develop games that can train individuals for roles in architecture, engineering, and construction. The funding, awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), will support FIU’s exploration into how institutions can train skilled workers at a time when robotics and autonomous systems are increasingly being deployed in the AEC sector.

As part of the project, faculty from the institution’s School of Architecture and School of Computing and Information Services will work together to develop a platform that will use virtual reality games to train workers through a personalized learning program. The learning tool is expected to focus on operational industrial robots, with learning delivery tailored for "differences in ability, experience, and sociocultural backgrounds."

The tool will see users asked to explain their decisions ...

A VR game allows users to 'save' a digital model of the Notre Dame Cathedral

2022-06-21T14:03:00-04:00

Assassin’s Creed Unity is a 2014 video game set in Paris in 1789 that includes a surprisingly detailed digital model of the cathedral [...] The video game version of the cathedral wasn’t detailed enough for that kind of forensic research, but the makers of the game did find a way to put their version of Notre-Dame back to work. Today, Ubisoft is releasing Save Notre-Dame on Fire, a virtual reality game set inside the cathedral on the day of the fire.

"We’re using real elements from the architecture to create something that’s interesting for the player. We have all the immensity of the real Notre-Dame," shares Ubisoft's SVP Deborah Papiernik with Fast Company. The game was released in unison with a new movie directed by Enemy at the Gates director Jean-Jacques Annaud that depicts the real-life heroism of the Paris Fire Brigade, which managed to salvage an incredible amount of church relics, bells, and other artifacts in process of preventing a nearly total loss of the structure.

In an effort to help people understand the value and importance of the Cathedral's rebuilding efforts the game acts as a form of "edu-tainment' reports Nate Berg of Fast Company. Ubisoft's VR game release follows their $565,000 donation to the rebuilding effort back in 2019.

Landscape architect uses video game development software to rethink digital landscapes

2019-08-23T21:08:00-04:00

The digital world of video games has changed over time thanks to architects and their expertise in spatial design and designing 3D environments. Digital model building are skillsets architects use everyday, so who better to help design these digital worlds? For landscape architect David Fletcher, the opportunity to help create the landscape for the video game "The Witness" was another way his San Francisco-based, Fletcher Studio, to create new digital infrastructures and explore 3-D modeling platforms.

Image still from video game "The Witness" © Jonathan Blow, Thekla Inc.

According to Erin Hudson of Narratively "David Fletcher had to reverse-engineer the past to create an island where its present-day environment would give players enough clues to piece together what happened. It was an infinitely harder task and the reason its developer, Blow, decided to hire architects like Fletcher."

Image still from video game "The Witness" © Jonathan Blow, Thekla Inc.

The game was released in 2016...

Faculty members from Cornell's architecture department develop virtual reality program for popular video game company Epic Games

2019-06-27T13:56:00-04:00

Faculty in the Department of Architecture have received a cash gift from Epic Games Inc. in support of their work on Virtual Places, a project that is adapting the company's virtual reality (VR) gaming engine, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), for architectural and urban design.

Three Cornell professors used virtual reality to create and expand on their research project Virtual Places. The study of architecture and video games is a growing focus. Within academia and practice, VR is a tool which helps unpack architectural ideas for learning as well as creating visualization possibilities for clients. Epic Games Inc., a video game and software development company known for creating the popular online game Fortnite, selected Professor Henry Richardson, Assistant Professor Timur Dogan, and Assistant Professor of the Practice Martin Miller as winners of a cash prize out of a pool of invited finalists for the international competition.

Image of Rockerfeller Center - taken from Virtual Places: Real Time Experiential Design and Visualization of Urban Spaces. Image courtesy of Cornell AAP

According to Richardson, "Virtual Places was launched this spring with a research seminar called Gaming Architecture. Both upper-class undergraduates and graduate students 'stress t...

SimCity's lasting impact on architects and city planners

2019-03-06T15:25:00-05:00

Along the way, the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding — and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living. For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, “SimCity” was their first taste of running a city.

"It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go," writes Jessica Roy for the Los Angeles Times.

Happen to look for a real life urban planning opportunity? Check out our Archinect job board for available positions.

Do architects make better video games? Cue Shedwork's Sable, 2019's beautifully anticipated video game

2019-01-11T19:20:00-05:00

Captivating audiences with their brief presentation at last year's 2018 E3 Expo, the game's development team Shedworks featured a strikingly captivating trailer that showed a world filled with beautiful desert landscapes, eye-catching color palettes, and of course beautiful renditions of towering architecture. Taking much inspiration from classic graphic artists like Jean “Moebius” Giraud and games such as 80 Days and Sunless Sea, the overall plot of the game revolves around a young character named Sable and her exploration of a world whose history is unknown. Sable's lead designer uses his architectural education to create a world that expressed a way for gamers and enthusiasts to understand architecture through exploration.

Sable - game play screen capture Image © Shedworks

When developing the game's overall concept lead designer Greg Kythreotis explains it was important to build something artistically evocative. Much of the game c...

A tour of experiential magical realism games from the Triennale Game Collection

2016-08-16T13:11:00-04:00

Among the discoveries in the magical realist-flavored experiential series of smartphone games from the Triennale Game Collection is just how compelling this format is for exploring the nuances of architecture, even if that architecture pushes the limits of physics (and is often heavily layered with surreal color and effects).

"The Worm Room" by Katie Rose Pipkin. Image: Triennale Game Collection.

With visual allusions to everything from Pixar to Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain," the games emphasize the experience (hence, "experiential") over a plot-driven, goal-oriented construct. Nonetheless, each game has its own internal logic and rules, and rewards players with different visual effects and paths the longer they explore each world.

"Neighbor" by by Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy and Ben Babbitt. Image: Triennale Game Collection.

Check out this video, which takes you through a quick tour of the five iOS/Android compatible games:

Console narratives: how games incorporate architectural storytelling

2016-03-16T12:58:00-04:00

Dark Souls and Bloodborne both put the player in decaying worlds and invite them to peel back layers of history. From the ruins of Firelink Shrine and its relationship to the Undead Church above it, to the various connections between Bloodborne’s Central Yharnam, Old Yharnam and Cathedral Ward, Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team of environment designers imply much of the game’s narrative through the clash between one architectural style and another; between one layer of history and the next.

Perhaps you're ready to take a break from diving and dodging through problematic MEP in Rhino to enjoy the scripted unfurling of these (non-deadline driven) complex spatial narratives, some of which are inspired by the work of real-world firms like Herzog & de Meuron.

What's new in architecturally-related game design? This, for starters:

Interdependent city design video game Block'hood launches Thursday

2016-03-09T20:03:00-05:00

The complexities of designing at the scale of a city could take years to enumerate, but with Block'hood, a game where players design neighborhoods in various modes of complexity with over 80 pre-set blocks, it takes only minutes to start encountering these challenges first hand. Developed and designed by Jose Sanchez and Gentaro Makinoda, Block'hood's players are encouraged to think "ecologically," which is to say, designing an environment that not only sustains itself but can work interdependently with other neighborhood designs. If a design does not have enough resources, it can become victim to decay.

The perpetually evolving game, which has its public launch March 10th, has five modes: "Sandbox," which allows players to build a resources-constrained neighborhood without any particular goal in mind, "Challenge" which limits the number of blocks and resources a player can use to construct a neighborhood, "Education" which focuses on real-world city problems, "Research" which incor...

SimCity and beyond: the history of city-building games

2015-10-16T13:28:00-04:00

Cities are everywhere. Billions of us live in them, and many of us think we could do a better job than the planners. But for the past 26 years dating back to the original SimCity, we've mostly been proving that idea false. [...] And now, here, I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour through the history of the city-building genre—from its antecedents to the hot new thing.

Related on Archinect:

How video game engines may influence the future of architecture (and everything else)

2015-03-05T13:47:00-05:00

Epic Games, the company best known for Gears of War, has a very different plan for this generation of video games — one that expands far beyond what games are typically assumed to be. [...] In this future, or present if you ask Sweeney, lessons learned from one field, say an architect designing a virtual building, can be applied to games or film, and likewise. Sweeney believes the potential application of the engine across all fields increases exponentially as information is shared.