Awards & Nominations
TECHELITE has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History
VR AntRiksh
Summary
This app aims at proving a virtual tour to NASA’s missions and stories. The user can experience the events using a VR headset or in AR. The AI guide acts as a Historian and demonstrates the missions to the user. The user feels like he himself is exploring the place with a guide. The user gets to select what they want to explore and there is also an option to select a specific mission to explore. The guide i.e. the assistant tells the history for the missions carried out by NASA over the years and educates the user. This app provides an interactive way to know and gain knowledge about the various missions and the ongoing work by NASA.
How We Addressed This Challenge
The challenge is to tell stories of NASA Earth science—its history or its ongoing work—using interactive digital tools. We have created an app that provides a virtual tour to NASA Earth science and its various other missions form the very beginning. This app will provide a virtual tour to all the events. It will have an AI Assistant that will be the historian describing about the events. The user will be able to gain knowledge and learn about the history in an interactive way. The VR based app will help the user to visualize how the technology has evolved over time. When the user opens the app, they get a wide variety to select. After the selection of the event, the historian will appear and welcome the user and then both the user and the historian start to discover the events one by one. It gives the user a personal guide to all the events and also provides the opportunity to explore it by themselves. By this interactive and immersive experience, the user will be able to learn better and visualize. We are also planning to include the hand tracking and the feedback system for more immersive user experience so as to provide the user to touch and feel things and experience can reach to next level.
How We Developed This Project
As humanity’s venture into space has brought new knowledge about Earth and has provided us with the information which wasn’t believed earlier like the people used to think that the surface of the Earth is flat which is actually not. Laika (a dog) was sent to space, many people don’t even know that. Digital tools help in better visualization and knowledge. Hence, we thought of making this app that will make people more aware and the immersive experience will create interest of the common people to know the history which they were not aware of. History is considered to be boring but we decided to make it interesting using the latest technology of Augmented Reality and Virtual reality i.e. AR AND VR. This approach will make the application interesting even while telling the history.
We used Unity 3D to develop the app. In this we also used C# scripting for interactivity of the objects and proper functioning of the app. We used Google VR SDK for making the VR part of the app. We also used the Google ARCore and AR Foundation for the AR section of the app. The users will require a VR box for experiencing the immersive VR (which is not very costly).
The problem which we faced was the proper camera placement to enhance the user experience but we resolved it soon. Also, the AI historian is a bit typical part of the app. The main achievement is the proper use of the data set provided by NASA while making of the application to enhance the immersive user experience.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used the space agency data in order to create immersive VR experience for the users. Also, we had to describe about the history of the NASA Earth Science, so we used the data for the missions and the events by NASA from the data-sets and the resources provided. All the resources used by us made an excellent immersive user experience and provided us with the accurate data and history by NASA.
Project Demo
Data & Resources
- https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science
- https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/documents
- https://www.nasa.gov/content/solar-missions-list
- https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/models
- https://www.mixamo.com/
- https://assetstore.unity.com/
- https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=103&field_phase_tid=All