Skip to main content

NASA-Microsoft to bring Mars closer home with HoloLens

The US space agency and tech giant Microsoft have teamed up to create "Destination: Mars", a guided tour of Mars using the same Hololens headset technology that helps scientists plan the Curiosity rover's activities on Red Planet.

It will offer people a guided tour of an area of Mars with astronaut Buzz Aldrin this summer in an interactive exhibit using the Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality headset.

“Mixed reality” means that virtual elements are merged with the user's actual environment, creating a world in which real and virtual objects can interact.

The "Destination: Mars" exhibit will open at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex in Florida this summer, the US space agency said in a statement.

Guests will “visit” several sites on Mars, reconstructed using real imagery from NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet since August 2012.

Aldrin, an Apollo 11 astronaut who walked on the moon in 1969, will serve as “holographic tour guide” on the journey.

Curiosity Mars rover driver Erisa Hines of JPL will also appear holographically, leading participants to places on Mars where scientists have made exciting discoveries and explaining what we have learned about the planet.

“This experience lets the public explore Mars in an entirely new way. To walk through the exact landscape that Curiosity is roving across puts its achievements and discoveries into beautiful context,” said Doug Ellison, visualisation producer at JPL.

“Destination: Mars” is an adaptation of OnSight, a Mars rover mission operations tool co-developed by Microsoft and JPL.

A pilot group of scientists uses OnSight in their work supporting the Curiosity Mars rover's operations.

“We're excited to give the public a chance to see Mars using cutting-edge technologies that help scientists plan Curiosity's activities on Mars today," added Jeff Norris, project manager for OnSight and "Destination: Mars”.

“While freely exploring the terrain, participants learn about processes that have shaped this alien world,” he added.

Abigail Fraeman, a Curiosity science team member at JPL, uses OnSight to make recommendations about where the rover should drive and which features to study in more detail.

Recently OnSight helped her and a colleague identify the transition point between two Martian rock formations which they would like to study in further detail.

By utilising the same technologies and datasets as OnSight, “Destination: Mars” offers participants a glimpse of Mars as seen by mission scientists.

“By connecting astronauts to experts on the ground, mixed reality could be transformational for scientific and engineering efforts in space," Norris said.

As NASA prepares to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, the public will now be able to preview the experience the astronauts will have as they walk and study the Martian surface.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard
Continue reading »

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...
Continue reading »

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...
Continue reading »