Space Reality | Virtual Space Exploration
The Challenge | Virtual Space Exploration
PyxisVR
PyxisVR is the first 3D educational application, which let's users to travel through space environment updated in real-time
My name is Giorgi and we're presenting PyxisVR. We have selected the virtual space exploration.
First let's say a few words about the team.
We are a team of 2 young entrepreneurs. Nika and I, and we have quite some experience in virtual and augmented reality application development. We've been working on and are working on several virtual and augmented reality startups.
So, what do we do and why we've decided to choose virtual space exploration as a challenge. We’ve created a VR application which lets people experience what it’s like to be an astronaut, to explore the moon, or to simulate the gravity of mars. And do all that while the planet locations, the stars, the rotations get updated in realtime, just like in the real world. So essentially what we're doing is simulating the real world, which gives us the ability to truly explore planets from earth.
Now why did we choose this challenge?
We believe now is the best time for space exploration. Today, we are achieving things we never could before. So we think, that one of the most important things we can do now to accelerate the advancement in space, is to get as many people excited and interested about space exploration as possible. Some people are already doing things that gets everyone's attention, one of them is our good friend
Elon Musk. We all know in February 6, 2018, SpaceX launched a Tesla roadster car in space, and you could watch the live feed of it leaving the earth, which was very exciting.
So what you can do in the current version of the application, is you can watch where Tesla roadster is in space, just like it was in the live feed, but we're simulating it. You can also see the asteroid Bennu and its location, which was actually another challenge, and most of all, you can explore the moon and mars from space and from their surface. Now let's watch a 2 minute video recorded in the application
Problems faced: First of all, we had very limited time which made us struggle a lot. Apart from this, getting/making 3D models was stressful as .obj files are rare for mars and moon. One of the biggest problems we faced was animating all the objects, cars, camera movement and overall physics. Finally, we are quite satisfied by the work we have done and think it was the best of we could do in this limited time.
Used Resources:
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://nasa3...
https://cdn.thingiverse.com/zipfiles/74/af/02/31/6...
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environme...
SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.