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During the holiday season in 2016, Alan Chan spent his week-long vacation exploring Mars. As most of us were doing Christmas shopping at the last minute, they ate turkey and reminded us why discussing politics with dad was a bad idea. Chan was balancing, reckless, on the red surface of Mars in a space buggy. Not a bad time to get away from Earth, as it happens!
"You're looking at the satellite data and you just do not have the sense of scale, is not it?" Chan told Digital Trends. "You think," Here are some mountains ", but you do not have an idea of what it would actually look like if you were there – it's like getting on a plane – all the cities you've visited and the roads you travel suddenly look completely different. [Being on the surface] completely changes your perception. "
Plane images could be made in 3D and traversed by the Unreal engine to make it an explorable experience.
Before we go any further, we should note that no, you have not been somehow missed on the biggest homebrew rocket history of all time. If you have the impression of having seen something about a solitary March explorer on TV, you will certainly remember the character of Matt Damon The Martian .
Chan – creator of California video games – was not physically on Mars. Instead, he was exploring the red planet through a hacked house project in which he was taking satellite and terrain camera data from the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of NASA, and transforming it into photorealistic virtual reproduction of the Martian landscape
"These data were available online for scientific purposes," he continued. "What I did was take this information and reformat it to put it in a game engine." With careful triangulation software, the flat images could be transformed into three dimensions and pass through the Unreal engine. to make it explorable. experience. "I do not think anyone else has ever done it," he said.
The results are something that, until Elon Musk and others finally act, allow users to explore the Mars sites of the world. Huge Victoria crater at Candor Chasma, one of the largest canyons in the Valles Marineris canyon system on the planet. You can even play it in immersive virtual reality, thanks to an Oculus Rift headset.
Less Play, More Data Visualization
Finally, Red Rover is not really a game. There are no mission objectives , no evil extraterrestrials hidden behind rocks to mow, and no way to die. What is an impressive demonstration of advanced data visualization; how creators can take advantage of the incredible spatial data produced by organizations like NASA and make it something close and understandable for the rest of us.
"I'd like to see how to fly through the Great Red Spot on Jupiter but I do not have enough data to do it right now."
That's not all indeed, Chan recognized. The Martian buggy itself is, by its own admission, ridiculously under control. He has also taken some liberties with the sounds of the ambient wind, which are there to make it more immersive, but are probably more than what you will hear in real life. However, most of the drama license involved creating textures to flesh out the extra detail needed for the planet.
Though it's the highest resolution we still have from Mars, Chan notes that it's only pixel by half-meter. This means that, when downloaded with complete fidelity, the surfaces look terribly stretched out.
To counter this, he replaced them with new sand, soil, and rock texture data to make it more beautiful. ("You can turn that off in the menu 'options' so that you can see the data as they were actually taken." If you're more scientifically oriented, you might want to do that. . ")
In the future, Chan would like to extend the project to other planets, whenever the data will be available. I'd love to see it flying through the Great Red Spot on Jupiter but I do not have enough data to do it for the moment, "he said.
March Remains main objective, however.In this spirit, the title will continue to evolve as more and more HiRISE data will be sent back to Earth.
In his Steam notes for the "game", Chan – who is in the late forties – notes that he grew up believing that we would have colonized Mars at this point. To date, we do not have it, that is why Red Rover may be your best chance to explore the planet.
At $ 4.99 on Steam, compared to the billions spent by space agencies, it is certainly the cheapest
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