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Physics Education & Scholarship
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What's the project?

This work, supported by a DCAD Collaborative Innovation Grant, was a proof-of-concept pilot to produce sample augmented reality tutorial material. The initial work was completed over summer 2022 with the coding done by two summer interns. First year Computer Science students Ben Shattock and Christopher Teo coded the simulations in Unity and built all the software, 3D rendering and hand tracking from scratch.

The DCAD Collaborative Innovation Grant

The apps were also ported to an Oculus Quest 2 for use in Virtual Reality. 

The initial work consisted of simulating two simple bar magnets and rendering their overlapping 3D magnetic field lines. We then extended this to simple point charges. The main app is a configurable optics table with a series of lasers, concave and convex lenses and reflecting plates. Both ideal lenses and realistic ones were included. The user can then place any combination of these elements on the table and observe the behaviour. We included both ideal lenses and ones that behave in a more realistic manner.

See the short video for a flavour of the apps...

 

 

A Virtual Optical Table

Virtual optical table

A customisable virtual optical table. The user can add any configuration of lasers, concave and convex lenses, reflecting and reflecting mirrors.

Simple bar magnets with 3D magnetic fields

Simple bar magnets with 3D magnetic fields

Two simple bar magnets, the blue lines shows the 3D magnetic fields and how they interact.

What next?

The project team led by Dr Pippa Petts, are working with DCAD and Dr Craig Stewart from Computer Science to determine the next stage for this work.

One other app that we began development for is a physics playground aimed at school age children. We plan to make an interactive space experience where the children can experience sports in reduced gravity, explore a virtual model of the solar system and experience a spacewalk. 

For questions on this project or if you want to try the simulations for yourself, please contact Pippa or Craig via the links below.