An educational platform designed to make multibeam echosounder (MBES) surveying tangible for students, trainees and practising hydrographers has been released by the Department of Civil Engineering’s GPHIDRO Hydrographic Research Group at the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV) in Brazil. Conceived and developed by Professor Italo Ferreira, head of GPHIDRO, the MBES Simulator translates concepts that usually live inside operational software, technical standards and field experience into interactive three-dimensional scenes that anyone with a computer can explore.
The MBES Simulator platform addresses a recurring gap in hydrographic education. Acoustic survey geometry, swath coverage, ray bending in the water column, uncertainty propagation (TVU and THU) and platform attitude effects are often described in equations and norms before students ever see them happen. The new educational platform inverts that order. It builds the scene first, then exposes the variables, allowing the user to observe how each survey parameter shapes the resulting point cloud on the seafloor.
Interactive viewing modes
Without requiring real survey data or proprietary acquisition software, the MBES Simulator computes, in real time, the effective range, ping rate, real swath width and line spacing of a configurable multibeam system. It generates synthetic seafloor surfaces, including flat, sloped, undulated and wall-like geometries, and projects synthetic point clouds onto them following the geometry of the simulated sensor. Vessel attitude variables, such as roll, pitch, heading and heave, can be added, along with residual stabilization effects. This enables the user to observe how motion compensation, or its absence, propagates into the final dataset.
Two interactive viewing modes – a top-down planar view and an oblique three-dimensional perspective – are complemented by transverse and longitudinal profile windows. Synthetic point clouds can be exported in CSV, XYZ and PLY, and any scene can be saved as a PNG image. The current public release is version 8.0.0, which consolidates more than a year of iterative development guided by feedback from students, hydrographic trainees and survey professionals.
The previous public version of the MBES Simulator – vessel track, axes, and seafloor point cloud, all there from the start. (Image courtesy: Italo Ferreira)
Enhancing hydrographic education and training
Hydrographic training has historically depended on access to vessels, expensive sensors and licensed software. For many institutions in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, this dependency is the main barrier to educating new hydrographers and disseminating modern survey practice. The MBES Simulator was conceived to lower that barrier. It is positioned as a complementary tool to operational software, not a replacement, focusing on the cognitive step that precedes data acquisition, i.e. understanding geometry.
The platform supports three principal use cases. In academic teaching, it helps students develop spatial intuition about acoustic acquisition before being exposed to real datasets. In professional training, it provides a controlled environment for instructors to demonstrate how each parameter shapes coverage, density and uncertainty. In institutional and technical communication, it produces clear visual materials for reports, proposals and stakeholder meetings, without requiring extensive post-processing.
Making abstract equations understandable
“The MBES Simulator was built around a simple observation. Most newcomers to hydrography do not struggle with the physics of acoustic propagation, they struggle to picture what is actually happening below the hull,” says Prof Italo Ferreira, coordinator of GPHIDRO and developer of the platform. “If we can show them, in three dimensions, how survey lines, swath geometry and motion translate into a point cloud, the equations stop being abstract.”
Official launch in July
The MBES Simulator will be officially presented during the 11th edition of TLH, the hydrographic survey training programme organized by GPHIDRO, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this July. The programme is structured as a 40-hour, in-person course combining theory and practice and is open to international participants. Beyond the simulator, attendees will have access to the broader GPHIDRO software ecosystem, which includes EasePlanning and MB Density for survey planning, HydroStat for statistical quality analysis, HydroAdjust for least squares dimensional control, CAV Generator for volumetric computations and siltation monitoring, and TideLab for tidal time series analysis.
Researchers, instructors and institutions interested in collaborating, evaluating the platform or hosting demonstrations can contact Prof Italo Ferreira, coordinator of GPHIDRO, directly:
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