Buoyancy Lab provides a VR environment that can simulate and visualize hydrostatic forces. It is designed to make learning physics concepts more engaging to middle school students. The lab has 3 modes: the inspect mode, the build mode and the play mode.

Item Description
Role Lead Programmer
Timeline March 2018 - June 2018
Tools Used Unity, HTC Vive, Photoshop

Key Activities

  • Implemented physics based hydrostatic force simulation with the formula $ \mathrm{d}\vec{F}=\rho gz\mathrm{d}S\vec{n} $. [1]
  • Exploited parallelism in the algorithm and achieved up to 4x frame rate with a job system.

  1. Based on Jacques Kerner's Water interaction model for boats in video games ↩︎

In the inspect mode, the user can check different physics properties of a floating object.
The profiled performance without multi-threading (top) vs. with multi-threading (bottom). The elapsed time in the red boxes shows that this optimization can reduce simulation time by about 75%.