DUBLIN — Fourteen students have spent a semester in a New River Community College class playing games and getting credit for it.

They used the advanced gaming technology to design and model an indoor sports complex and conference center on an actual 17-acre tract on campus.

This technology represents Serious Games (known in gaming literature as SG) in the college’s refurbished computer-aided design laboratory in Godbey Hall.

“I’d put this CAD lab up against just about any CAD lab in the country,” said Jeff Levy, head of the college’s computer-assisted design department. “From the floor to the ceiling, everything in here is brand-new.”

By the time the project was finished, students could conduct a real-time tour of the building in three dimensions on a computer screen.

The result of their work has been put on an interactive DVD, about 100 copies of which are being mailed out to news agencies, game companies and architectural and animation businesses to publicize the project.

Viewers have the illusion of flying through the three major parts of the building on a 3-D tour.

“The animation when this thing is complete, it’ll look like real life,” said Scott Turner, who headed the class’ animation group.

The class was divided into teams. Joey Conrad headed the civil engineering group. Josh Rapp led the gaming group.

Turner just completed his fourth year at NRCC, adding an auto-CAD degree to his previous 3-D solid modeling and animation degrees. He is the one who would make a series of pictures into eight-second segments and then use a computer editing station to combine them into virtual-tour short films. He did the digital part and Jesse Parrish, another student, did the design part.

Parrish and Turner are engaged. They are both from Floyd but did not meet until they were going to NRCC.

Before the 3-D gaming technology, Turner said, it would have taken months to create a virtual room. “Four years ago, I’d never have imagined I could do this,” he said.

“This is a big thing for this area,” he said. “In my opinion, Southwest Virginia needs this, technology-wise … I’d like to see architectural firms and other people get more educated about it.”

A lot of the more spectacular TV ads and shows use the technology, Turner said. The images look real but are really animation.

“Basically what we’re doing is we’re putting a real-world application into a gaming situation,” said Rapp, who works part time as a telemarketer at Global Contract Services in downtown Pulaski. “They can actually see our structure and view it in real fields.”

Conrad works part time with Anderson & Associates in Blacksburg.

“I wanted to use a real-world project,” said Levy, who worked in architectural and engineering design for four years before becoming a teacher. He and Carlotta Eaton, its information technology cluster leader, and animation instructor Michael May taught the course.

The students went through the steps of forming their own company, New River Design & Development, and proceeded as though Pulaski County was their client for developing the center. They used the real topographical files from the engineering company that studied the 17 acres.

Levy said he spent months talking with students at Stanford University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of California, Los Angeles; and other schools to see if any were combining design, animation gaming, graphic user interfaces, architectural and civil engineering in anything similar. “There wasn’t anybody that was even close.”

Developers of the course spent two to three months negotiating with three gaming companies before choosing the Unreal Gaming Engine produced by Epic Games. “They gave us access to their most updated gaming engine,” Levy said.

The project was funded in part by a National Science Foundation grant. “We’ve finagled it through free stuff that we’ve gotten and what the college has ponied up for us,” Levy said.

“We’re hoping to build on this.”