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

