Japan using game development engines for urban planning and disaster management — Kimono sales also stretching Unity and Unreal Engine capabilities beyond the small screen

Unreal Engine and Unity are game engines that will be very familiar to regular readers, and these successful tools are used in a vast range of game genres on the PC and beyond. However, due to their utility and flexibility, these 3D game engines are starting to be adopted in businesses far removed from the gaming scene. Today, Nikkei Asia shares some eye-catching examples of innovative game engine use in Japan, ranging from urban redevelopment companies and disaster planning agencies to consumer-facing businesses like the famous Daimaru Matsuzakaya Department Store.

Game developers have been using Unreal Engine and Unity to model the game worlds of your dreams and nightmares for decades. In that time, these tools have become increasingly broad, yet refined and accurate – designing everything between the magical and the grimly real worlds gamers love to be immersed in. In this context, it is no surprise to see them being leveraged for digital twin-style projects in Japan. Actually, we’ve also seen and heard Nvidia put forward the case for digital twins for a number of years.

In Japan, at least two companies in the civil construction infrastructure fields are using game engines to improve the way they work. General contractor Taisei is highlighted by Nikkei for using digital twins to present urban development plans, for example. The firm has been using this medium to show how its plans would unfold since 2020, according to the source.

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Another example of this kind of macro-project being advanced using game engines comes from Tokyo-based Cluster. This company is using game engines to build a prediction platform, where the impacts of natural disasters can be considered. Cluster has worked with the city of Sendai in visualizing/simulating flooding based on existing hazard maps. This kind of work can aid greatly in planning for disaster relief.

In consumer-facing businesses, the use of 3D gaming engines couldn’t be more different than in another example singled out by Nikkei. The business news source says that department store Daimaru Matsuzakaya creates and sells digital kimonos to customers. These seem to be based on historic/real kimono designs that you might find inside the store, but are recreated in 3D models to dress your avatar on the VR Chat platform. These are said to be very popular digital goods, with 10,000 digital kimono browsers recorded in the week after launch alone.

Those running Japan's non-gaming game engine-adopting companies praise the tools for allowing metaverses to be created beyond the world of games. In addition to the amazing toolsets these 3D engines provide to such businesses, they are also attractive for cost savings and developer familiarity.

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