New generations of computer hardware allow game developers to create increasingly large and detailed game worlds.

Despite this drastic increase in size, however, most game levels are still finite in size. Players usually become aware of the confines of the game level very quickly, even though the boundaries are often hidden from the player by clever placement of obstacles in order to disguise the fact that the game level is limited in size, and to suggest that there is more of the world to explore beyond the boundaries.

With these improvements in computer hardware, the construction of game worlds becomes less limited by performance, but limitations of time and production resources become more apparent. As game worlds increase in size, artists need to create more objects, textures, animations, sounds and music.

There are two strategies in use today to create large game worlds filled with objects. First, computer games are produced with increasing budgets to hire more staff, hardware and software to cater for the rising demand of increasingly large and detailed game worlds. Second, artists reuse geometries and textures many times throughout the game to reduce the workload.

Variation and randomness of objects, buildings and people are key features in our real world. The importance of variation and randomness of objects in a game world grows with the ability to render more detail, otherwise the frequent repetition of geometries and textures becomes obvious.

Infinitylab investigates how virtual spaces can be generated by off loading time consuming tasks such as the creation of a visual variety of objects and their distribution in the virtual space, to hardware and software. To generate a visual variety of objects and distribute them in the virtual space, we use a procedural modelling and texturing approach.

Our research efforts mainly concentrate are guided by the following research questions:

1. How can three-dimensional objects with a variety in form and detail be generated using computer software?

2. How can three-dimensional virtual spaces that consist of objects with a variety in form and detail be generated in real-time using computer software?

3. How can users control the generation of objects and the generation of the virtual space?