High-Level Project Summary
An educational game made in Unity, which lets you drive around a lunar rover on the surface of the moon, extracted from years of scans of the lunar surface by NASA.You get to see various different moon landing sites over time, including but not limited to the Apollo moon landings. Another mode lets you explore various NASA missions and their history in a virtual museum, currently featuring the Apollo 15 moon landing.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
The game is built using the Unity 3D game engine and can be exported to run on PCs, mobile, and even your web browser using WebGL. It uses SteamVR to work as a virtual reality game with your phone as the display.
The terrain and models in the game are actual mars and moon surface scans from publicly available NASA data. I've used moon landing models and data provided by NASA and I have optimized them to a large extent, to allow the game to run well on varying hardware.
- Children these days aren’t exposed to the wonders of SpaceTech
- Earlier, people like Christopher Columbus who had nothing to lose decided to set off in search of territories with no guarantee of finding anything, other than just the thrill of discovering something that no man had ever found before
- These days, people tend to find happiness is not taking risks in life
- People who have a knack for exploring undiscovered territories never break out of their bubble
- Quriosity provides them with an enjoyable way to explore the limits of what humanity has explored of the observable universe
- I strive to answer the questions asked by children curious about space and its possibilities by putting them in an explorable environment in virtual reality where they can satisfy that desire and find out about historical space landings and facts about space
The idea behind the game is to re-introduce space education into the lives of children who have written off anything related to physics in their lives. I want to spread my love for space exploration and innate curiosity for the unknown with every home in the world. As such, I have built a game that allows players to experience the surface of planets like never before, travel in a rover, and see famed landing sites, such as the Apollo 11 landing site, all whilst learning more about space exploration, than ever before. The museum allows players to learn about interesting artifacts used in space missions over the years. SImulated background communication with Huston allows players to learn about the terrain, composition, and history of the surface, as they explore it! Our goal is to make sure no child ever looks at the night sky the same way after having played Quriosity.
In keeping with my goal of the re-introduction of space education, Quriosity will be completely free to download and will have no paywalls restricting access to more knowledge.
Space Agency Data
Quriosity used the surface scan data from NASA LRO and MAVEN orbiters to recreate the moon and mars in the highest possible fidelity. We also used some NASA-provided 3d models in the apollo recreations.
Hackathon Journey
Over the course of this hackathon, I learned many new technical skills and gained a deep insight into the valuable data provided by NASA. I was inspired by the notion of utilizing Virtual Reality to recreate outer space in the best possible way to ensure that I am able to share my love of space with everyone and make it much more fun and interactive while doing so. To create the project, I first planned out the entire project timeline and listed down the features I wanted to implement. I then created a minimum viable product (MVP) and then proceeded to add additional features and polish existing ones. During the process, I ran into some setbacks, mainly due to the amazingly high-resolution data provided by NASA which caused both Unity and Blender to crash when imported. This was resolved by using 3DS max which can handle much bigger files due to its common use in the video game and film animation industry and then I proceeded to optimize the data and subsequently the generated 3d models to ensure that quriosity can even run on low-end devices. In the end I'd like to thank NASA and the local event organizers to provide me with the ability to participate and build quriosity.
References
NASA Resources:
Visualizations | 3D Resources (nasa.gov)
Mars 3D Model | NASA Solar System Exploration
Models | 3D Resources (nasa.gov)
Tools Used:
Unity
Blender
3DS Max
Megascans
SteamVR
Tags
#moon, #mars, #planets, #VR, #Apollo, #NASA
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.