Role for videogame design in agriculture and regeneration

Traditional videogame design tools may well have potential for use in agriculture and landscape simulation to better plan and predict crop yields, while promoting regenerative agriculture.

A collaboration between the APPF’s ANU node and the ANU Borevitz lab, the project investigated the potential for traditional videogame design tools to model and procedurally generate the spatial ecological processes that occur in a farm system.

Led by Kirsty Yeates who recently completed her thesis Fine Scale Modelling for Optimising Mixed-Use Primary Production in Heterogeneous Landscapes, the project confirmed the value in further exploring the marrying of videogame tools with agricultural outcomes.

Using SideFX’s Houdini - a powerful tool for the procedural generation of virtual entities, such as simulated hair - Ruaraidh Mills from the APPF explored the modelling of quantitative weather and ground conditions on existing, real-world farm localities.

These simulations included the tracking of over 400 million generated raindrops over a day’s downpour, and the resulting runover and ground saturation to influence vegetative growth.

The end goal of this research is to be able to model and procedurally generate the spatial ecological processes that occur in a farm system for farmers to better plan and predict crop yields, while promoting regenerative agriculture.

A demo video can be found here: https://youtu.be/KQgvPlEpJv0

[embed]https://youtu.be/KQgvPlEpJv0[/embed]

12 August 2020