Inspiration for an ISS VR Experience
Published Nov 30, 2016
Update: Upon additional research, a studio in Melbourne, Australia, has already created a VR experience of ISS called EARTHLIGHT, “a first person exploration game taking place on the International Space Station”. The demo video looks pretty awesome. I’m happy and sad at the same time; happy that I can soon experience in virtual reality my imagination, but sad that I was not able to work on it myself.
A few days ago, I was listening to an episode of Travel with Rick Steves, where Rick interviewed astronaut Chris Hadfield about the astronaut’s several months long experience in the International Space Station. Hadfield had this to say:
Hadfield: You think about that Rick all the time. You look down, as you come across the Sahara, if you look right you can see all the way down to The Great Rift and Lake Victoria. And if you look left, you can see all the way to Cairo, and the Mediterranian. You can see the whole length of the Nile, just by sweeping you head left and right. And when you think of the thousands of years of history along that river, and explorers trying to find the source of the Nile and the blue Nile and all that, and you just move your chin and it’s right there. And you cross the Atlantic in just a few minutes and the all pervasive feeling of the historic struggles that have allowed us to understand our planet and they’re right with you the whole time. You really see a global perspective with a great respect for the history that got us where we are.
Hadfield circled the earth almost 2600 times during his time at the International Space Station. He took amazing photographs of the sights of the earth and published in You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes.
I haven’t looked at the book yet, and I bet the photographs are amazing, but the following exchange about the photographs Hadfield took picqued my interest more than anything:
Rick: Chris, when you’re taking these beautiful photographs that fill your book, who owns these photographs? Does NASA just let you take the photographs and do with them what you like? What kind of legalities are there?
Hadfield: We all own these photographs. They belong to everybody… and all profit go to charity because those pictures belong to everybody.
Rick: Is that because you’re a nice guy, or is that because-
Hadfield: No no.. Haha.. I was a government employee and I was using government equipment on government time. But in truth, they all belong to everybody.
While I was listening to all of this, something solidfied in my mind and an idea was born. I imagined a VR experience of being an astronaut in the International Space Station. I would be able to explore the entire inside of the ISS (and I was already thinking about how one could get detailed map of the station, textures etc). More than that, I would be able to look out the windows the same way astronauts do, and look at the Earth passing below (or up?) and look at all the continents in all different kinds of weather. Small details and ideas began racing in my mind. How would I get the detailed map of earth? Could I sync the VR ISS to the exact same path the real ISS is taking in real-time? Would it be possible to display the earth, not as a flat and uninteresting globe like Google Earth, but a true picture of how it might look to Astronauts from the real ISS? Could I get accurate cloud data and build a beautiful virtual Earth that could be as close to the real thing?
However, the biggest problem is this - I am primarily a PHP developer. I have little or no knowledge of building graphical programs from scratch.
I am willing to learn, however. I think it would be a good challenge and an interesting personal project.