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Uyen Dang
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Seawalls VR Experience

An educational VR experience for Meta Quest 2 about how seawalls protect coastlines from erosion and flooding, with real-time water from Zibra AI's liquid simulation.

Timeline
Oct 2024 – Mar 2025
Category
VR · Water simulation
Tools
Unity, Zibra Liquid, Substance 3D Painter
Seawalls VR Experience, cover image

An educational VR experience for Meta Quest 2 about how seawalls protect coastal areas from erosion and flooding. Users explore different seawall types and learn about their construction, effectiveness, and environmental impact. The central challenge was water: it has to rise and fall like a tide and behave believably against each seawall design, in real time, on a standalone headset.

My Role

  • Researched real-time water simulation options for Unity VR; the project went with Zibra AI's liquid simulation.
  • Remodeled and retopologized the island, bridge, and seawall models, originally made by other team members, so they work as colliders in the liquid simulation.
  • Set up and tuned the simulation parameters: no leaking through walls, tidal rise and fall, and believable flow around three seawall designs.

Acknowledgements

Developed for the RAD Lab at the University of Miami School of Architecture. All rights belong to the lab and its creators; the project is for educational and research use only.

View RAD Lab Website

Project Overview

  • Technical Requirements
  • Choosing a Water Simulation
  • VR Setup: Meta XR SDK
  • Zibra Liquid Integration
  • Remodeling for the Simulation
  • Environment and Texturing
  • Testing Seawall Designs
  • Final Integration

Technical Requirements

The interaction between water and seawall is the lesson, so it had to look right for every seawall type. It also had to run in real time on a Meta Quest 2 without hurting comfort.

Choosing a Water Simulation

I researched approaches to real-time water in Unity VR, from physics-based fluid simulation to existing products.

Water is the interactive core of the experience: it shows what seawalls hold back.
Water is the interactive core of the experience: it shows what seawalls hold back.

Zibra AI's liquid simulation was chosen because it delivered realistic, interactive water in real time, which the project depended on.

VR Setup: Meta XR SDK

The Unity project was set up with the Meta XR SDK for the Meta Quest 2, covering headset configuration and the navigation and interaction users need to explore the seawalls and the water.

Zibra Liquid Integration

Integrating Zibra meant importing its SDK, configuring the liquid, and getting it to interact correctly with the terrain and the seawalls. Two requirements came first: water must never leak through a wall, and it must rise and fall like a tide.

Leak test: the water stays behind the seawall.

Early tests used small wall sections. Adjusting the simulation parameters and the collider setup until the water stopped leaking gave a stable starting point.

Water against a small section of seawall.

The next test scaled up to a larger section to check tidal rise and fall over a wider area. The water rose and fell naturally, which met one of the project's key goals.

A larger seawall section, with the water level rising and falling like a tide.

Remodeling for the Simulation

Zibra builds its colliders from meshes, and its server only processes meshes under a triangle limit. The existing island, bridge, and seawall models were far above it, so I retopologized them in Blender: much lower polygon counts with the same silhouettes. The lighter meshes also helped performance on the Quest 2.

Retopologizing the bridge railings in Blender.
Retopologizing the bridge railings in Blender.
Testing the retopologized railings with the liquid simulation in Unity.
Retopologized seawalls compared with the original geometry.
Retopologized seawalls compared with the original geometry.

Environment and Texturing

The scene is a coastal island: a Unity terrain with water bodies and the seawalls placed along the shore.

Fully textured model in Substance 3D Painter.
Fully textured model in Substance 3D Painter.

The optimized models were brought into Unity with materials set up to work with the liquid simulation, and the scene was lit to read clearly in the headset.

Testing Seawall Designs

Each iteration was tested in the Quest 2 for performance, usability, and realism, and the simulation settings and models were adjusted based on what the tests showed. Three seawall designs were tested against the water.

Close-up of the first seawall type with Zibra AI's water simulation
Scene view of the first seawall type with Zibra AI's water simulation

The first design was tested most extensively, and its results shaped the settings used for the others.

Close-up of the second seawall type with Zibra AI's water simulation
Scene view of the second seawall type with Zibra AI's water simulation

The second design has more detailed geometry, which needed further adjustments to the simulation settings.

Close-up of the third seawall type with Zibra AI's water simulation
Scene view of the third seawall type with Zibra AI's water simulation

The third and most detailed design shows how the water flows around complex geometry.

Final Integration

The full island with seawalls and water simulation.
The full island with seawalls and water simulation.

The final build brings the island, the seawalls, and the water simulation together, followed by performance passes, bug fixing, and checks that the educational content comes across in the headset.

Full island view of the final build: seawalls, water simulation, and environment.

Asset Credits

Liquid simulation: Zibra AI.

Zibra AI

Other assets: