Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History
Foundation
Summary
We believe that history should be lived, that’s why we propose the development of a virtual reality app to live and try to understand some of the most important moments in space research that lead to Earth research. By being aware of our past and present, we can make an impact in the future. So, we provide a solution for this challenge using computer technologies such as: coding in C#, developing scenarios in Virtual Reality with Unity, if we can approach this technology to several users, we can make an impact in the way most people see and understand the space technology development.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We believe that history should be lived, that’s why we propose the development of a virtual reality app using Unity to live one of the most important moments in space research.
This app was designed to be interactive with the users, so, taking that as an inspiration, we designed a space museum, by using a virtual reality device for computers, users can see the elements that compose this historical moment. By touching the elements that compose the scene, they can access the moments as if they were there.
With this app we want to approach the work and research that scientists around the world do to everyone that’s interested in space and Earth science, specially to kids who are interested and encourage them to pursue a science career.
How We Developed This Project
Our inspiration is to contribute to science and technology development, but not only for Mexico we want to contribute with our scientific knowledge for humanity, to be conscious of our past and present to build a better future. New technologies are created every day, such as virtual reality (VR) and its applications in daily life, that’s why we wanted to create a museum in VR, to tell stories in a unique way, approaching everyone interested in an immersive way. To do this, we are using the advantages of the video game motor Unity, with this, we can create VR apps for multiple platforms, making it easy to distribute this app to a lot users. However, with all techonology developed until these days, VR is still a technology in development, so that means that it's not completely easy to develop, it requires from a lot of hardware power.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
NASA has very well documented sites to do research, we decided to use the historical archives to tell a story from our vision of the satellite history and his development and importance to study Earth and his phenomena. For this, we used the infographic of satellite history, the videos from NASA Earth, and, to build our models we used the images and the photographs included in the archives.
Project Demo
Data & Resources
NASA History on the Commons: Earth science https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons/albums/72157646697326324
First Planetary Images https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons/albums/72157630517132928
NASA Visible Earth https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/collection/1484/blue-marble
Landsat Image gallery https://landsat.visibleearth.nasa.gov/
Images of global climate change https://climate.nasa.gov/images-of-change?id=738#738-southeastern-australia-turns-green
NASA Earth and science videos https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/videos/index.html
Risk and exploration: Earth, sea and stars https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4701/riskandexploration.pdf
NASA history https://history.nasa.gov/
NASA history videos https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-history/videos