Motivation

Mankind always fascinated about traveling. From the very beginning of the earth they travailed from one place to another. Exploring new land leads them to discovering great cities,metropolis even continent that we now live in. Gradually their thirst for experiencing new place grew and that lead them to the very first human space exploration by Apollo 11 mission.

The earth's atmosphere an imperfect window on the universe. The purpose of the space telescopes arises because these efforts provides significant findings that alters theories of the structure and evolution of the universe.

We team VR_WEBB created a Virtual Reality application for everyone in the world to get a full virtual experience of James Webb space telescope mission and how its going to explore the universe.

Solution

We divided our Virtual Reality project into three parts.

1. Interacting with all the important instrument of Webb
2. Experiencing Webb from launch to deploy.
3. Knowing the story of the Webb Space Telescope.

Interacting with all the important instrument of Webb:

In this part the user can interact with every part of the telescope and see 360 degrees. Instruments are showing using a menu and whenever user select one instrument, that one will automatically highlighted for better understanding. User will also be able to read all the info about that instrument.

Experiencing Webb from launch to deploy:

Second part is will enable the user to witness the Webb telescope launch and deploy virtually. User can experience how Ariane 5 launch with Webb telescope and how the telescope deploy into the space step by step.

Knowing the story of the Webb Space Telescope:

By the third part people will able to learn about the story of Webb like, how it’s begin, how many engineers worked for it etc through various NASA’s video.

In this whole adventurous journey of VR_WEBB user will be guided by a virtual assistant called “Guddi”.

We used Google Cardboard SDK to build VR_WEBB and cardboard SDK is an open source and supported by all kinds of low cost headset. So our app will be accessible by a very wide range of people who can’t afford high cost headset.

As anyone can easily use VR_WEBB without a problem, so it will make people more curious about space and NASA’s different mission.

Main feature of VR_WEBB

• Exploring all instrument of Webb.
• Learning details of every instrument.
• Experiencing how Ariane 5 take Webb telescope to space.
• Witnessing how Webb will be deployed into space step by step.
• Understanding the story of Webb telescope.

Resources used from NASA:

• Different parts (like optics, instruments, systems ) information (https://jwst.nasa.gov/Webb3d/#).
• JWST 3D model (https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/jwst).
• JWST launch and deployment information (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6ihVeEoUdo&feature=youtu.be).
• JWST Deployment and Beauty Animations (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10337).
• JWST videos for story (https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/multimedia/videos.html).
• JWST mission information (https://jwst.nasa.gov/#).

Development process :

• At first we sketch the system design by pencil and paper and three experiences are initially selected for the final development.
• We modified the model for different scene into 3ds Max and Blender.
• We animated the JWST model into Autodesk Maya as we didn’t find the animation anywhere.
• After that we created three different scenes using the resources and resources information provided by nasa.
• Main application is developed using Unity 3D game engine.
• We used Google Cardboard VR SDK for low cost experience.
• A user can control our application with or without controller(using point selection).
• All the scripting is done with C# programming language.

Tools used :

• Unity 3D game engine.
• 3ds Max, Blender.
• C# programing language.
• Substance Painter.
• Photoshop.
• Google Cardboard SDK.
• Text to speech service from ttsmp3 (https://ttsmp3.com/).

Checkout :

GitHub