Designing Virtual Reality Environments through an Authoring System Based on CAD Floor Plans: A Methodology and Case Study Applied to Electric Power Substations for Supervision

The adoption of Virtual Reality (RV) technologies in prototype design and process revision has contributed to multiple industry areas. Nonetheless, the development of VR systems for engineering is a complex task, as it involves specialized teams handling low-level code development. Given these problems, the goal of this study is presenting a methodology for designing VR, through an Authoring System based on Computer-Aided Design (CAD). The presented methodology provides an easy integration of electric power substation floor plans and Virtual Reality software (VRS), as well as three-dimensional and symbol modeling conventions. Centralized software architecture was developed, composed of the CAD Editor, input manager and VRS. The methodology was evaluated through a case study applied to the conception (elaboration) of electric power substations (EPS) as part of a Research and Development (R&D) project for training and field assets supervision. The results demonstrated visual precision and high integrity in elaboration of a VR environment from the CAD floor plan. This work also presents a comparative analysis between manual conception and the Authoring System.

Design and Implementation of A Collaborative Educational Gamification Authoring System

Gamification has been widely applied on modern education. Most of them are applied to stimulate learning motivation and improve learning efficiency for stu-dents. A successful game-based learning content development depends on both an adaptive educational activity planning and a high-quality game design. In edu-cational activity planning, the 5E learning cycle model presents a framework for constructive learning theories and is effectively used in education sciences. Thus, in this study, a proposed collaborative educational gamification authoring system, CeGAS, is recommended to teachers to realize their game-based learning/teaching planning activities based on the 5E learning cycle strategy. Using the CeGAS, rich experienced teachers could easily plan and conduct their educational activities without considering the complexity and difficulty of game implementation. As each experienced teacher follows the steps of the 5E learning cycle in the pro-posed script editing system, including engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation, an available and exclusive game-based learning con-tent with the 5E learning strategy will be developed. We are looking forward to achieving the goals of educational gamification with the educational game author-ing system.