BUILDING BRIDGES BETWEEN REAL AND VIRTUAL WORLDS USING MATLAB

The past fifteen years have seen unprecedented advances in the development of rich and complex virtual worlds (Minecraft was originally released in 2011), and with that the potential for using these worlds for educational purposes has exploded. While these advances provide spectacular opportunities for pedagogy, it remains true that this development has not occurred with teaching as a primary objective. In order to optimize educational returns on these advancements, it becomes necessary to build bridges between these existing virtual worlds and more traditional methods employed in geoscience education.

In this study, we explore some of these efforts to connect the more traditional methods of geologic mapping, cross-section development, and geophysics with developing fields of virtual landscapes and digital worlds using MATLAB, though similar results could be obtained with any comparable computer language.

We begin by demonstrating the extrapolation from a geologic map into a digital 3D representation of the regional subsurface to identify the rock units that would be present at any point in 3D space for a given region. This information is used to create a population of outcrops in a Minecraft world that can be investigated by students moving their avatar through the virtual space, deploying tools to identify rock types and strike and dip, and developing a geologic map that reflects their interpretation of the underlying geology.

An ancillary benefit is that this 3D representation of the subsurface can be used to generate cross-sections between any two points to an arbitrary depth, allowing for superposition of rock units with collected geophysical datasets such as resistivity transects. This allows a user to understand how the rock units correspond to subsurface features illuminated by the geophysics, e.g., in a karst environment correlations between rock units, water flow paths, and void spaces become readily apparent.

Finally, we explore the idea of allowing students to deploy resistivity lines in the Minecraft world using Redstone tools, exporting that data into MATLAB, and manipulating the data into a form usable by inversion software. The 3D representation of the subsurface can then be used to generate resistivity pseudo-sections that can be interpreted by the student, for example, to identify the location of unknown cave systems in a karst environment.