1. Exploring Mars on Earth
SPACE
and Software
Development
Part 3:
Exploring Mars on Earth
with Virtual Reality!

2. Mars Desert Research Station
The Mars Society: To Explore and Settle A New World!
I’ve been a volunteer for them nearly 20 years.
Mars Desert Research Station
near Hanksville, Utah

5. Mars Desert Research Station The Mars Society’s Analog Research Program
Program started in 2001
197 Crews
1200+ crewmembers
2 week rotations
6-10 crew per rotation
Researching Geology, Biology, Astronomy, and (most importantly) the “Human Factors Challenges” of living and working on Mars.
Website: mdrs.marssociety.org
(James has maintained the website since 2011)

6. VR for Public Outreach of Mars
(NASA’s main center for Mars Research)
VR for Public Outreach of Mars
VR for Supporting the
Exploration of Mars

7. One of the foremost VR experts SV WebGL Meetup Organizer
Dr. Robert Zubrin, PhD
Founder & President,
Mr. Shannon Norrell
One of the foremost VR experts
SV WebGL Meetup Organizer
Former Chief VR Evangelist, CTO, HR
Former Senior Web Dev, Microsoft
Former Senior UI Dev, Apple
World’s Foremost Expert on Mars
President, Pioneer Astronautics (NASA Vendor)

8. MarsVR Mission Seal Designed by
James Burk
And
Paul Conrad
(SpaceX Design Vendor)

9. Picture this…
#CrowdExploring

10. Kickstarter Video

13. The MarsVR Team Shannon Norrell VR Expert & Director of Engineering
Az Balabanian “The Wizard of Az” Photogrammetry expert / Azadux
Dr. Greg Chamitoff astronaut, NASA engineer, professor of engineering Texas A&M, founder of SpaceCRAFT VR
Jeff Dillon senior engineer at Unity Technologies
+ Several VR & Photogrammetry companies
+ Mars Society Volunteers across the world!

14. MarsVR Phase 1: MDRS Training Environment
Train crews using VR before they come to the Mars Desert Research Station.
Scan all facilities inside and out with the latest photogrammetry techniques.
Fly a drone to get 1 square mile of the Mars-like terrain in the Utah desert.
Create Training “Missions” covering EVAs, Airlock, ATV procedures and facility acclimation.
Open source the core platform. (Free as in Freedom!)
Sell Steam keys for general public to unlock training to raise further funds.

15. Video 1

17. A Serious Research Tool
MDRS is all about the human factors challenges for the first human landings on Mars. MarsVR supports the work already happening.
MarsVR can pilot the methods of “CrowdExploring” allowing people back on earth to assist the astronauts with landing site exploration.
Piloting out the real-time link between astronauts and VR users, over short and long distances.
We’ll be creating an engineering-grade VR environment & development platform that ultimately can be used (in later phases) to show real Mars terrain via returned data (using MOLA, MOC, HiRISE, CRISM, and other datasets)

18. Technologies We’re Using
Unity & C# are our development platform & IDE
Photogrammetry (DSLR Photos + LIDAR data)
Drone Image Processing (Pix4D, RealityCapture)
3-D Modeling tools (Blender, Maya)
Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive
Slack for developer communication
Github for open source development
SteamVR & Viveport for software distribution
Wikis, YouTube videos, and other training materials.
K-12 Curriculum (Moodle)

19. Top VR Headsets

20. Other Headsets

21. DEMO

22. Video 2

23. Current Progress All Phase 1 assets captured.
Working to clean up in Phase 1 environment.
Early Access build provided to Kickstarter Backers.
Public Beta before end of the year.
Phase 2 Proposal written
Scouting of EVA locations achieved.

24. Open Source Environment & Assets
We will license the core VR environment built in Unity with MIT License.
We will provide the actual Unity project to build & customize the environment on Github.
We’ll also share (via Creative Commons maybe?) our MDRS terrain models and all 3-D Models of the base & facilities.
Eventually we will also open source the Mission Content.

25. Phase 2 5 Square Miles of terrain Interactive missions
More EVA missions
Real-time links (Multiplayer)
Improved scans & terrain
Teleoperate rovers / drones
Game Layer?

26. Phase 3 & Beyond Phase 3 Vision:
Start with the globe of Mars. All named features and landing sites tagged.
“Click” (point) at a location and zoom all the way down to surface level.
Walk around among the real terrain that’s been 3-D rendered using MOLA data and overlaid with orbiter imagery.
Courtesy NatGeo

27. Follow our progress at: MarsVR.io
THANKS!
Follow our progress at:
MarsVR.io

28. APPENDIX

29. Kickstarter Levels $5 – Digital Certificate & Thank you
$10 – Digital poster of Final MDRS Render
$25 – Embroidered patches
$30 – Steam Key to unlock mission content
$50 – Metal Medallion (limited run of 250)
$100 – Early Access
$400 – Become a core developer
$5000 – Become an MDRS Crewmember on Crew 197 in October 2018.

30. Technical Professional Tech Companies Space Cadet
Space Advocacy Organizations
Current
Manager, PMO
Past
Sr Technical Project Manager
Sr Program Manager
Project Manager II
Project Manager I
Computer Lab Dude
IT Director,
Seattle Chapter,
Founding Member (since 1998)
Vice President &
Founding Member (since 2000)
Director of Communications &
Founding Member (since 2004)

31. A STEM Education Platform
Our project is building everything with STEM Education in mind.
Teachers can use the environment to teach about Mars & geology.
Students can use it to learn C# programming, 3-D modelling, game development, and VR development.
We are going to have training for Unity, and tutorials of how to open and customize our environment.

32. A Public Outreach Tool
MarsVR is being designed as a public outreach tool, to instill the vision of humans to Mars via a visceral and realistic environment.
Others have done Mars environments (JPL, Hololens, HTC Vive, various Mars games such as Mars2030) but there have been barriers to broad usage and distribution.