Voxels are cells on a 3D regular grid. Voxel-based scenes have many applications, including frequent use in simulations or games. Over the years, the field of high-resolution voxel scenes has progressed significantly, allowing for compressing and real-time editing of high-resolution scenes. This possibility of editing high-resolution scenes led to various editing tools. This thesis aims to expand this set of tools with a focus on more complex simulation-based solutions. We explored the field of terrain weathering and decided on a spheroidal weathering tool to perform weathering on voxel-based scenes. One of the existing limitations of this particular method was that it did not account for debris simulation. We ultimately decided to add a granular simulation using a layer-based approach that integrates with the weathering tool but is also able to function in a standalone manner.
This thesis presents three highly-customizable editing tools for voxel-based scenes: spheroidal weathering, granular simulation, and a combined tool that enables weathering with debris simulation. These tools are integrated into the HashDAG framework, which is a high-resolution voxel-grid method building upon a directed acyclic graph representation of a sparse voxel octree. Our solutions enable close to real-time editing for changes with a smaller regional support. There is room for improvement in terms of performance at scale, with various potential ideas presented in the future work section.

Relive is a sports application that seeks to increase the retention rate of its user base. The project entails a route builder that can be incorporated in the Relive app. A route builder has several challenges, both in supporting user-friendly interaction, rendering the map and calculating the route. These challenges lead to design goals, such as a user experience focus, optimization of performance, and continuation of the project. To achieve these goals, the project is approached in an agile way with weekly planning meetings and tri-weekly stand-ups to keep it organized and well planned. The front-end features are based on a specific target audience: the Relive users that do not use a third party app for sporting activities. The screen is intuitive and supports storing of planned routes. A route can be created, edited and loaded in the Record functionality of the Relive app. To support the front-end, the back-end handles route calculation and route storing. The route calculation is done using Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm. In addition, a proof of concept customized route calculation is created that focuses on popularity oriented routing. Route storing makes use of the internal databases of Relive and is integrated in the existing systems. Each feature is tested with automated end-to-end and unit tests. Additionally, user tests are performed to get valuable feedback from external users. Apart from active user participation, random users were selected to join a route builder experiment. During the project, more than 22 thousand users obtained the route builder feature. Each click is timed and tracked to make sure that the feature performed as expected. Based on the events and user surveys, another iteration of the application was made by making improvements based on the acquired information. These improvements are validated using event tracking to measure the desired improvements.