1UP for NASA Earth

    The Challenge

    Your challenge is to create a new video game that uses NASA Earth data, providing players a novel way to interact and have fun with NASA Earth data. What you create can inform, educate, inspire, or simply provide an enjoyable experience for players – the Earth is your stage!

    Background

    The late 1900s saw the dramatic rise of both Earth observing satellite missions and the home video game console. Nevertheless, more than three decades later examples of Earth observations within video games are incredibly sparse!

    In addition to helping us understand the biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere, NASA’s Earth Observations have provided a virtual view of our planet as it changes across time. While game developers spend years building digital representations of detailed game components for players’ interactions, NASA’s satellite and suborbital data can provide accurate and breathtaking foundations for the next viral gaming environment.

    Potential Considerations

    • You can build a game in any genre – action, adventure, RPG, strategy – the choice is yours!
    • NASA has a wealth of Earth data you can use. Think creatively about how these datasets could be used:
      • Satellite Imagery - decades of Earth imagery that visually represents how the planet looks and has changed across time.
      • Other satellite data - non-optical remote sensing data based on radar, sounder, microwave, ultrasound, lidar, and more! While more challenging to incorporate, these data could add new dynamic components to your game.
      • Ground data – NASA also has access to a large amount of data gathered by people on the ground. These include photographs of sky, ground, and water and even measurements of tree heights.
    • Here are some game ideas, but your creativity beyond these examples is not just welcome, but encouraged!
      • Matching Game – players could flip over a set of Earth images and match identical pairs by memory. This could be run in a competitive format where players are scored by the number of matches they find, or played alone in a more leisurely format.
      • Puzzle – Break a NASA satellite image into pieces and ask players to reassemble it into a complete picture.
      • Geography Quiz - Give players a choice of on the ground images gathered from the GLOBE land cover app and ask them to guess which of a series of satellite images match that location. This will test their ability to identify known global geography.
      • Navigation Challenge – Use Earth imagery as the base for a driving or navigation game. Have players navigate across images of the globe using different colors or features as obstacles that need to be avoided.
      • The land-change map – Allow users access to two images (for example a Landsat image from the 1980’s and 2019) from an area of interest and then over impose the newer image on top of the older one to see changes in land cover. Alternatively, the task could be to identify some aspect of change between images over a limited period of time.