Virtual Interactive Physics Lab (VIP Lab)

Thumbnail Image
Date
2015
Authors
Raneen Younis
Rawan Masri
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
As the world is heading to utilize the Technology in all aspects of life and the Smartphone applications are dominating a huge section of the market, many parties are seeking to get the advantage of this technological development.The idea of this project is to build a 2D interactive world based on the principles of physics with the help of the LibGDX and Box2D libraries. It provides virtual cross platform (desktop/mobile) environment that can be utilized to build physics-driven applications: e.g. games and interactive teaching tools that help in empowering creativity of students and teachers. This virtual environment will give the opportunity for anybody to create any of the above mentioned applications easily without the need to learn programming language and the use of sophisticated programs. The VIP Lab provides to its users more than 100 objects that differ in their actions, movements and physical properties.The construction of these objects comes from a range of circular and polygonal shapes linked with each other in different ways. These linked objects have been given physical properties, kinetic/central energies and different actions with different associated sound effect to become closer to the physical world required .The VIP Lab also provides various backgrounds and animations that can be used to build attractive applications and games.In order to give the greatest possible freedom of creativity, the user can change any physical property, energy and direction/speed of the movements for any object he/she wants. Moreover, The VIP Lap provides the ability to connect any object with any other object to create a new one. The new object can take different torque and speed. This way gives user the ability to create unlimited number of objects. All these objects are built in a world governed by Newton laws.The VIP Lap consists of two parts: studio and loader. In the studio user creates his/her own physical world. During the creation all objects neither conform to newton laws nor do they have physical properties or actions. Therefore they can be moved and controlled easily. With press of run button all objects come alive and acting in the virtual physical world according to its own characteristics. In the loader part the studio output will be read according to the application type.To demonstrate the power of the VIP Lab we built a complete game (Called Newton Road) that can read all the outputs of the VIP Lab, which are JSON files, to generate its own levels. The VIP Lab can create different levels with different degrees and upload them to server (in our case Dropbox) on the other side the game player can update the game levels. The objective of the game is building the necessary paths needed to make Newton reaches apple and make sure he avoids the potential risks.
Description
Keywords
Citation