Cost-effective virtual world development for serious games

Developing a virtual world environment from scratch normally involves a large number of model creations, animations and event simulations. Such undertakings generally require a large amount of man-hours and expensive software. This paper introduces an open-source approach that will enable developers to easily and quickly create scenario-driven collaborative environments for serious games. A case study based on the development of a virtual crisis room in the Pandora project¹ is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.