NASA Partners With Epic Games to Create a Martian Metaverse Simulation

NASA

NASA, the U.S. space agency, has partnered with Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, to build a challenge for developers to help create a Martian metaverse experience. The challenge will include various tasks, including designing several key environments for Martian astronauts, which will be rendered using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 to provide a realistic environment.

NASA will develop a Martian metaverse to help with training exercises

NASA, the US space agency, recently released a challenge to attract developers to help build a Martian metaverse environment for training purposes. The challenge, which was posted on Herox, a crowdsourcing problem-solving platform, calls on developers to help the institution create “virtual reality (XR) assets and scenarios for use by NASA in the research focused on extravehicular activities on the surface of Mars.”

The challenge aims to populate an already-started metaverse world called MarsXR, which has now mapped 400 km2 of Mars terrain, with realistic day/night cycles, all modeled with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, which will also be used by the developers to create the submissions in the challenge.

Virtual experiences

The virtual experiences that NASA has defined as categories for this task include setting up camp, scientific research, maintenance, exploration, and mind-blowing, each with a different goal to fulfill. The challenge will reward winners with a total prize pool of $70,000, split across twenty individual prizes. This means that each prize for each category will average $6,000.

This activity has already gathered a lot of attention from several groups that want to contribute to grow NASA’s Martian metaverse, according to the Herox page. More than 24 teams and 237 innovators are contributing to the construction of the Martian simulation, which will help the agency to cut costs by using a virtual reality module known as Apache to train upcoming astronauts in various experiences.

While institutions have been slow to embrace VR and Metaverse-based apps, that seems to be changing as Microsoft and Meta introduce VR suites to the field. Microsoft announced last year that it would integrate Mesh, an app that will replace video with digital avatars for meetings and presentations, directly into the popular Microsoft Teams app. For its part, Meta has just announced the launch of Venues in its flagship metaverse application, Horizon Worlds.

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