Using unity to study properties of a two-dimensional ideal gas

Abstract

Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies primarily used to develop 2D and 3D video games. Unity features a powerful physics engine and a GUI-based integrated development environment with support for scripting using C#. This way, game developers can easily create objects either by point-and-click operations or programmatically and assign physical properties (such as mass, initial position and velocity, and friction coefficient) to these objects, while the built-in physics engine takes care of the time evolution of the system. We believe that these features make Unity also suitable for various educational simulations and exercises. In this paper, we will use Unity and its physics engine to study properties of a two-dimensional ideal gas. In the Unity simulation, gas particles will be represented as discs with some physical properties and placed within a container. Unity's physics engine will be used to evolve the system in time, and the state of the system will be observed. Finally, we will provide an analysis of various scenarios and comparisons of observed system properties to the theoretical framework.