SAE GR PLANETEERS| Build a Planet
Project Details
The Challenge | Build a Planet
VR PLANETARY LABORATORY
A serious educational game featuring a VR experience, which allows players to enter a fictional spaceship cockpit and configure important parameters and planetary settings (radius, distance from the star, mass, etc.), in order to create a habitable planet.
In brief
The VR PLANETARY LABORATORY is a gamified interactive application for PC and/or VR environments. Its purpose is to let users explore possible choices and configurations in order to create a habitable planet. Players assume the role of a planet creator inside a virtual spaceship cockpit and can manipulate their planetary system through various controls.
The idea
Most people have a very limited notion of what constitutes a habitable planet, mainly because we have observed life develop in only one planet, Earth. Thus, we make the assumption that a habitable planet is a planet with the ability to allow the concentration of liquid water in normal conditions.
The existence of a solvent like liquid water is crucial. However it is only one of the vital “configurations” that a habitable planet should have. The VR PLANETARY LABORATORY provides a fun and educative sandbox environment for experimentation, with the aim to present in an entertaining, playful manner, what makes a planet suitable to host earthling-like life.
The project
Players start the game in a spaceship. Inside, there is a panel with controls that the player can handle. Outside the spaceship there is a planet, near the field of view of the player. By manipulating the controls of the panel, the user can configure the planet’s attributes and values. These factors of the planet are vital for the creation of life. Some of the values available on this project include: Average Distance from the Sun, Planet Radius, Eccentricity of the Orbit, Water Percentage and Force of Gravity. These values are correlated with each other, referencing actual numbers as closely to reality as possible.
The player faces the challenge not only to remember the right values, but also to consume and understand realistic information and educative experience of space and its objects. While configuring these controls, the right combinations create the planet suitable for producing life, which is the winning condition for each level / Solar System.
The future
We intend to polish the human-computer interaction experience with richer capabilities (e.g. touch and hand interaction using the VR controllers), and add intuitiveness in the user actions and their consequences.
Another future direction that we have designed and remains to be implemented is to utilize evolutionary algorithms in order to simulate the way life will take advantage of the planet user’s have created and the conditions it provides. With an initial population proportional to parameters such as landmass and planet surface and hyperparameters simulating the available resources, such as food and vital space (landmass, temperature, humidity, etc.), we can observe how “life” uses our planet and how much it can evolve.