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May 28, 2010
Tackling City Challenges: IBM Unveils New 'Serious Game'
Photo: Elbphilharmonie -- Hamburg's New Landmark: During a Roofing ceremony on May 28 & 29, the northern German metropolis Hamburg presents with the "Elbphilharmonie" its new concert house to the public. More than 5,000 guests gain an insight into the making of this unique concert house. Designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, this magnificent building is to become Hamburg's new landmark. (Foto © Hamburg Marketing GmbH).
IBM has announced CityOne, a new "serious game" that can help customers, business partners and students discover how to make cities and their industries smarter by solving real-world business, environmental and logistical problems.
Based on decades of experience in solving business challenges in creative ways, IBM's "serious" games are designed to train the workforce of tomorrow.
With an estimated one million people around the world moving into cities each week, experts predict the population in the world's cities will double by 2050. Today cities consume an estimated 75 percent of the world's energy, emit more than 80 percent of greenhouse gases, and lose as much as 20 percent of their water supply due to infrastructure leaks. As their urban populations continue to grow, and these metrics increase, civic leaders will face an unprecedented series of challenges as they modify their infrastructures to meet these challenges.
• For urban centers to sustain growth and play a positive and central role in the global economy, cities must grow smart.
With CityOne, IBM is providing a virtual environment that will help tomorrow's leaders learn how to apply advances in technology and better understand how these systems work.
• According to IBM, CityOne will be a no charge, "sim-style" game in which the player is tasked with guiding the city through a series of missions that include the Energy, Water, Banking and Retail industries.
For example, one mission involves a city where water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth. Supplies are becoming strained, the municipality is losing as much as 40 percent of its water supply through leaky infrastructure, and energy costs are steadily increasing. The player would be challenged to institute a Water Management System that would include accurate real-time data to make decisions on delivering the highest water quality most economically.
Players who promote a more customer-centric business model to the banks represented in their city will discover how mobile payments, dynamic invoicing, and micro-lending can impact business goals. In all of the missions described in the game, the player will need to determine the best way to invest to meet the financial, environmental, and sociological goals of the city's industries while balancing their budgets and the needs of the citizenry. In parallel, players will learn how the components of service reuse, process management, cloud, and collaborative technologies make business models more agile.
"Serious games allow professionals to inherently comprehend system interactions, and accurately model the potential business outcomes that can result, in a way that no other medium can do," said Nancy Pearson of IBM. "CityOne will simulate the challenges faced in a variety of industries so that businesses can explore a variety of solutions and explore the business impact before committing resources."
Source: IBM
|GlobalGiants.Com|
Edited & Posted by the Editor | 12:46 AM | Link to this Post
