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NASA Is Building a Virtual Mars For VR Viewing (unrealengine.com)
An anonymous reader writes: NASA will release a free virtual reality program this year that will simulate exploring the surface of Mars. "Players will be able to walk on the Red Planet as well as drive the Mars Rover..." reads the official announcement at UnrealEngine.com. The Mars 2030 Experience will be available on Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, and Samsung Gear VR, and will also "expand" to Sony PlayStation VR and HTC Vive, with additional versions for Android and iOS devices, and it will even be streamed on Twitch. NASA plans to reveal more details at this year's South by Southwest conference in March.
Is not an emulator.
Who said Nasa didn't have a plan for Mars?
Sending manned missions and robot rovers is a thing of the past and dangerous, the future is in VR missions.
Anybody going to Mars is not going to spend much time wandering around on the surface (owing to the radiation). It might be better therefore to simulate cowering underground in a cave hoping that the airseal doesn't blow out and kill you. Perhaps they could kill of every 3rd participant to really simulate the experience of living with the hazards of Mars.
They could put something a bit nippier than the mars rover in. What about tooling around mars in the batmobile or mad max's car? What about an F-14? That would be sweet!.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
This guy get's *fatter* every time I see his big lollypop head on the news. He would be more at home in Alabama than in North Korea, IMHO.
And this is the best that you c - that the-the government, the *U.S. government* can come up with? I mean, you-you're NASA for cryin' out loud, you put a man on the moon, you're geniuses! You-you're the guys that think this shit up! I'm sure you got a team of men sitting around somewhere right now just thinking shit up and somebody backing them up! You're telling me you don't have a backup plan, that these eight boy scouts right here, that is the world's hope, that's what you're telling me?
I mean, with all the practice they've had with Curiosity and now a virtual reality -- it anyone does ever get there, the conspiracy fruitloops will be positive it's Capricorn Two.
You know VR is vapourware when the biggest content creator is a goverment agency. Tax dollars at work giving Oculus and others one last chance.
Hey at least they stopped bothering us with posts about that Matt Damon movie.
I hope someone rips the data and uses it for fully destructible and modifiable environment games. Perhaps for Minecraft, Fallout 4 etc. I want to dig and make an underground base.
Also; will the Martian Pyramids and Face be properly represented in the VR? :)
When I first visited NASA Ames in 1989 to see Scott Fisher's early wire frame VR,
Mike McGreevy was the PI for the "Virtual Environment Telepresence workstation" project.
In this project, NASA was hard at work building a virtual Mars for VR viewing.
Here's a tech report from 1992:
http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=AC92-0326-23&qs=t%3D0%26N%3D4294130770%2B4294966753%2B4294929384
Am pleased to see NASA finally getting this done.
A quarter of a century later.
a realistic virtual mars may be interesting to explore for most people, and even useful to a few. but interest and usefulness will be limited. most people will find it boring after few minutes.
compare that to a virtual fantasy world with stuff to do. that is also interesting and can be useful. and if creators were truly innovative, less boring.
so what it the news?
They definitely should hire John Carmack & John Romero for this one.
Why not combine the two? Use their virtual environment as a frontend for a collaborative colony-building simulation (with our "best knowledge" data on the likely distribution of minerals and such incorporated), everything from mining, refining, production, goods transportation, installation/assembly, etc. People could contribute modules that accomplish tasks, with varying levels of design maturity (everything from stub modules that simply take a given set of inputs and yield a certain set of outputs, to actual nuts-and-bolts level of detail systems with rigid-body physics models and CFD chemistry calculations, all the way to real-world tested systems), along with code controlling how individual systems behave in different circumstances. All components would have defined realistic wear and tear over time / various consumables. The ultimate goal for participants would of course be a setup where every module is highly defined, down to the level of nuts and bolts, and every individual component in them can be manufactured by some other system on the planet, in a manner such that the net throughput is sufficient to produce all of hardware required to keep all systems operational plus enough to keep the associated humans alive and comfortable - while having the net mass that would have to be shipped to Mars as low as possible.
It wouldn't be something your "average gamer" would get involved in, I'm picturing something more for engineering students, active/retired engineers, etc, with some funds set aside for real-world testing of the more mature systems. You could generate interest by making clear that systems developed in the environment that reach a sufficient maturity state (passing real-world testing and showing a valuable service to future colonists) would be slated for actual deployment to Mars when the opportunity presents itself.
Detailed 3d environments aren't really a critical aspect of that for some systems (such as refining). But for others, such as transport, they're a critical part of the picture. Even for things like mining, having a good grasp of the types of environments that particular minerals occur in would be quite important - does X occur in this area on hard to access cliff faces, surrounded by dune fields, deep in craters, etc? How can we get it out of there and get it back to where we need it? How can we position each component so as to minimize transport requirements to all others (since one won't find all mineral deposits in the same location)? Etc.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
You don't find an barren desert of rust exciting?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I'm pretty sure I saw this article here a month or two ago.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Needs John Madden abilities.
Drive the mars rover. Thats about like desert bus but slower right?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!