Lightning Rock was approached by the Australian National University (ANU) school of physics to develop a better tool in assisting students to understand how electrical and magnetic fields operate. Current educational tools were all limited to a 2D interaction and could not provide a proper understanding of the 3D nature of these fields.
Field-VR, is an electric and magnetic field playground, which allows students to directly see the vectors that represent these fields. They can freely place objects which generate these fields to experiment with complex arrangements that are too difficult to visualise in a book or even a computer screen simulation.
Preliminary qualitative research shows students with self-identified poor spatial awareness particularly benefit from these experiences, while also enabling students to hypothesise and test field patterns that would likely be too complex for most to consider in a typical lab environment or homework problems.
“Preliminary qualitative research shows students with self-identified poor spatial awareness particularly benefit from these experiences”
The simulation was created in close partnership with physics professors to ensure all of the maths and visualization of strength and directionality of fields was accurate.
The simulation was originally developed for the HTC Vive due to the complexity of the graphical requirements. However with new software advancements Lightning Rock was able to port the application to the Oculus Quest (all in one/mobile VR) device. Additionally based on customer requests we were able to create a multiplayer functionality in the software. So that multiple users either in the same space, or in their own space that shared the same wi-fi network were able to visualise each other and manipulate shared fields/objects.