NASA Will Let You Explore Mars in 2016: Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 Recreates the Red Planet
Astronauts are expected to set foot on Mars in the 2030s, but even before that happens, people can already explore Mars for themselves as early as next year, thanks to Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, which recreates the planet in virtual reality.
Dubbed the Mars 2030 Experience, the project is a collaboration across NASA, Fusion, and MIT's Space Systems Laboratory. It will launch as an interactive, first-person simulation of an astronaut's life on Mars, complete with realistic missions.
To recreate the environments both inside and outside of the Mars Exploration Vehicle, the project is tapping into Irrational Games' technical designer Justin Sonnekalb and Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games.
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Unreal Engine 4 has been used to create games such as the newly released "ARK: Survival Evolved" and upcoming games "Street Fighter V" from Capcom and "Spyjinx" from Chair Entertainment, among others.
According to Sonnekalb, Mars 2030 will allow people, through virtual reality, to walk on Martian soil or drive the Mars Rover prototype across a vast expanse of Martian terrain. In addition to exploration, Mars 2030 will also provide users with research-oriented mission goals.
Sonnekalb's team is working toward making the whole experience as realistic and authentic as possible.
"We've been taking enormous care to provide the most realistic Martian environment possible, using real topographic data and accurate color reference," Sonnekalb is quoted as saying by Fortune. "Most images from Mars are either raw data that hasn't been color-corrected to match human eyesight, or has been tuned to reflect Earth's lighting conditions because it both affords greater visual contrast and appears more natural. There's something inherently cool about the authenticity of that, particularly with the additional immersion afforded by VR."
The Mars 2030 is a free virtual reality experience that will be initially available on Facebook's Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, and Samsung Gear VR. It is scheduled to launch in March during SXSW 2016 at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. More details about the project are expected to be revealed during this time.
