<aside> ℹ️ This is my first major project involving the creation of a physics simulator in Virtual Reality using the Unity Engine. Click it for more!
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The Virtual Reality Solar System (VRSS) Simulator is to act as an educational tool to teach Newtonian Gravity in an interactive manner using the Unity Engine and it's VR-support capabilities. This involves real-time customised gravity and orbits induced by this custom scripted physics, whilst also allowing the user to grab, throw and edit orbiting bodies.
This creates a Zero-G Sandbox environment, where the delicateness of orbits can be demonstrated and orbital mechanics can be presented in an entertaining visual format.
This is an extended project from my Final Year Physics BSc project alongside my partner and supervisor, where we took our prototype simulator and rebuilt it with better methods to optimise script execution and performance at larger scales.
Doing this allowed us to vastly improve the prototype into a bare-bones tool that can be used to let future students feel Newton’s Laws of Motion.
To build and simulate a model Solar System in VR. Conditions and requirements were set around:
The original Bachelor’s project was completed using the Unity Engine, GitHub and other open source resources that allowed a small group of Physics students to learn the engine and build a working simulation of the Solar System at a reduced scale. This scale reduction required scaling of the physical laws which was one of the core focuses of the project, amongst other obstacles and implementation which focused on user experience instead of accuracy.
The same set of tools were used to recreate the simulator with better organisation and stability, which implemented some techniques to overcome limitations of the Engine such as implementing a Floating Origin to avoid bugs and glitches in a large world caused by float variables.