NASA Collaborates With Epic Games to Launch a Martian Metaverse Simulation
Nasa has partnered with Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, to build a challenge for developers to help create a Martian metaverse experience. The challenge will include different tasks, including designing several key environments for Martian astronauts, which will be rendered using Epic Games Unreal Engine 5 to provide a realistic environment.
NASA attract developers to help build a Martian metaverse environment to aid in training purposes. The challenge posted in Herox, a crowdsourcing problem-solving platform, calls for developers to aid the institution in building "Virtual Reality" assets and scenarios for use by NASA in research focused on extravehicular activities on the surface of Mars.
The challenge aims to populate an already started metaverse world called MarsXR, which has now mapped 400 km of Mars terrain with realistic day/light cycles. all modeled with Epic Games Unreal Engine 5 which will also be used by the developers to create the submission in the challenge
The virtual experiences that NASA has defined as categories for this task include set up camp, scientific research, maintenance, exploration, and blowing our minds, each one with a different purpose to fulfill. The challenge will reward the winners with a total prize of $70,000 shared across 20 average of $6K
This activity has already gathered a lot of attention from several groups that want to contribute to growing NASA's Martian metaverse, according to the Herox page. More than 24 teams and 237 innovators are contributing to the construction of the Martian simulation, which will help the agency to cut costs by using a virtual reality module known as Apache to train upcoming astronauts in various experiences.
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