Erosion Visualization Application | Unity | Master’s Thesis
My master’s thesis involved developing an erosion visualization application for use in undergraduate classrooms. It was designed as a 3D, dynamic, interactive tool that supported temporal change visualization. The key goal of the work was to determine whether tools following this design philosophy have a place in geoscience classrooms to make learning surficial processes easier, as traditional visualization methods such as topographic maps and photographs are static, 2D, and uninteractive. The tool was built for iPads, and uses touch controls for all of its features to take advantage of students’ familiarity with mobile phone and tablet interfaces to make the learning curve smoother.
A series of short tutorial videos going over how every feature in the application works can be found on this GitHub repository, which also contains the source code that was submitted with my master’s thesis.
This demo shows the construction and erosion of a simple gully structure, both in isolation and incorporated into a more natural terrain. The annotation arrows are just to indicate what’s going on, and aren’t part of the application itself.