Virtual reality (VR) technologies have opened new possibilities for creating engaging educational games. This paper presents a serious VR game that immerses players into the activities of lunar exploration missions in a virtual environment. We designed and implemented the VR game with the goal of increasing players’ interest in space science. The game motivates players to learn more about historical facts of space missions that astronauts performed on the Moon in the 1970s. We studied usability and engagement of the game through user experience in both VR and non-VR versions of the game. The experimental results show that the VR version improved their engagement and enhanced the interest of players in learning more about the events of lunar exploration.

Achieving the efficient rendering of a large animated crowd with realistic visual appearance is a challenging task when players interact with a complex game scene. We present a real-time crowd rendering system that efficiently manages multiple types of character data on the GPU and integrates seamlessly with level-of-detail and visibility culling techniques. The character data, including vertices, triangles, vertex normals, texture coordinates, skeletons, and skinning weights, are stored as either buffer objects or textures in accordance with their access requirements at the rendering stage. Our system preserves the view-dependent visual appearance of individual character instances in the crowd and is executed with a fine-grained parallelization scheme. We compare our approach with the existing crowd rendering techniques. The experimental results show that our approach achieves better rendering performance and visual quality. Our approach is able to render a large crowd composed of tens of thousands of animated instances in real time by managing each type of character data in a single buffer object.