Gravbox is an educational tool to demonstrate the effects of
gravity on an object in space. It is an augmented reality
environment aimed at students in high-school and undergraduate
astronomy classes, but it's accessible to learners of all ages.
Users manipulate a physical sandbox to create their own
gravitational environment, and then they can launch an object
through this environment to see its orbit in the Universe that
they create. Bigger holes mean more massive objects, so they will
"pull" on the object more strongly than a small divot. The orbits
and sand surface information are projected onto the sand directly,
updating in real time to how the user moves the sand around. This
allows students to gain a better intuition for the complex
gravitational fields and mass distributions that fill the
Universe. Gravbox was developed by students at the University of
Iowa. Support for this work is provided by the National Science
Foundation grant AST-1614326 (PI:
Hai Fu) and the Department of Physics and
Astronomy at the University of Iowa.