Inspiration

Flying around with the Rift is fun. Mars is fun. Fly around Mars.

How it works

Look where you want to go with the Rift. Use Myo to control speed and turn.

Challenges I ran into

Rift and my laptop. SDKs for Unity, Myo, and Rift were all very easy to use.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Using satellite imagery of Mars to produce texture for tessellation of the 'Martian' surface. Brute force use of terrain maps were too slow.

What I learned

How to make games in Unity, how to use the Oculus SDK, and how to make normal maps for Unity.

What's next for Mars Explorer

Wrapping more images onto a sphere instead of just having a couple of planes to fly around. Then pull down interesting information to present to the user - primarily through interactive prompts to have information about particular places in the landscape spoken to them. This would be pulled from NASA's web pages and Wikipedia.

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