Low Cost Immersive VR Solutions for Serious Gaming

Games are used for other purposes than providing entertainment. This chapter is particularly interested in serious games, also known as simulators, with immersive virtual reality environments that are used for training and teaching purposes. These simulators have very stringent requirements and as a result, they are expensive to build. However, the authors managed to develop a ship handling simulator for the Sri Lanka Navy, at a cost of less than $20,000, which is an order of magnitude less costly than the cheapest available ship handling simulators. The cost of the simulator was kept at a minimum by using Commodity-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and also by adopting a development strategy which kept the client involved in the complete life cycle of the development. The availability of the required manpower at a very low cost in Sri Lanka was also beneficial.