Crystalwalk

Abstract

CrystalWalk is a web-based 3D interactive crystal editor and visualization software designed for teaching materials science and engineering aiming to provide an easy to use and accessible platform to students, professors and researchers. The development of CrystalWalk was initially justified by the lack of proper didactic tools for teaching crystal structures in materials science and engineering disciplines that has shown opportunities for the development of a new software focused on students’ needs. A thorough systematic review was performed within available crystallographic software aiming to further investigate students’ feedback and initially identified limitations. Aligned with the material sciences and engineering curricula, CrystalWalk introduces a new simplified crystallographic approach that creates crystal structures by combining a lattice with a translational or symmetric motif. In addition to a user-friendly interface, specific visualization and interaction tools, a comprehensive set of didactic functionalities and the support for advanced interaction and virtual reality technologies as Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, multi-touch devices and 3D printing technologies. CrystalWalk is open-source and accessible, integrating state of art technologies for the development of interactive web applications, such as HTML5/WebGL, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and responsive, resilient and elastic distributed systems. CrystalWalk has been released under the MIT License and is available from the project website at http://gvcm.ipen.br/CrystalWalk. CrystalWalk was evaluated under action-research premises and has successfully solved most of the problems identified in the systematic review, empowering students, professors and researchers through effective and positive impact as an accessible didactic software in introductory materials science classes.