Unity game engine in visualization, simulation and modelling

Abstract

Many software projects include different visualisation, simulation and modelling techniques. These can be used to represent data in human-comprehensible form, allow testing in simulations, and model complex or large objects in virtual environments to help design. Many academic research projects require these techniques as well. Game engines are software frameworks that implement these features to speed up development. This thesis investigates the usability of the Unity game engine for research projects. This is done via a systematic literature review on case studies that use Unity in their projects. The thesis found that Unity can be used in a wide variety of research fields and there were some common advantages and challenges of using Unity in the case studies. The most common advantages of Unity were its ease of use, licensing and scripting support, while challenges included the need of file format conversions, limited documentation for research projects and lacking simulation performance.