On the one hand, creating rich virtual worlds "by hand" like in the game Grand Theft Auto V is hugely expensive and limited to large studios. On the other hand, procedural content generation (PCG) allows tiny teams to create huge worlds like Hello Games did with only four people (in the beginning) for the recently released game No Man's Sky. Following in the footsteps of Hello Games, this paper tries to equip the reader with an overview about the state-of-the-art of how to build such a virtual world, i.e., a populated virtual city with buildings, streets, parks, vegetation, humans, and vehicles, using just PCG assets. Each PCG asset that is envisioned to bring the city to life is grouped and discussed in detail and the latest research trends in PCG are presented together with open questions. Using the above-mentioned PCG assets, instead of months, a city can be built in a mere couple of minutes by a user without much experience in designing 3D assets. The city can then be used for many applications like games, virtual reality (VR), or film.

Different solutions present the usage of bicycles with Head Mounted Display (HMD) in which virtual scenarios are visualized as background for athletes trainings or as cardiac patient rehabilitation systems. However, assessments on presence, degrees of immersion and user involvement with real bicycles in those virtual scenarios still are rare. In this paper we present a haptic interface of a real bicycle using HMDs as a mixed reality display using a procedural city as a background scenario. To measure and evaluate presence, two experiments had been conducted. One that simulates a virtual reality mode and a second that corresponds to a mixed reality mode. By think aloud method, it was possible to analyze the degree of presence, through control, focus, immersion and involvement factors. Six of the seven participants described that immersion is augmented as well as the feeling of presence in the mixed reality interface, feeling a better experience with the improvement of movements. Issues related to comfort and the visual graphic were also evaluated with some results on the stimulus that also opens new possibilities for future works in different areas.

Virtual cities as background scenarios can be used for many 3D video game genres like action. However, the procedural generation of virtual cities for specific video game genres is an ongoing research problem. In this paper, we seek to establish a grounding for future work into city generation for specific game genres by exploring how game designers approach existing generation tool-sets. Firstly, we look at the video game city Skara Brae from the partybased role-playing game The Bard's Tale and try to replicate it using the Wave Function Collapse (WFC) approach to procedural generation. We show in two experimental conditions which parameters for WFC are suitable for replicating the city. Secondly, a pilot user study with eight users shows how they approach creating different video game cities after they preselect a video game genre. The users' video game level ideas are then discussed, and different output levels are generated using WFC.

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