VR/AR Project 2 | Here Comes the Sun
Jae Rim Choi & Janelle Cueto
Download this project here
Our Take on This Project & How to Use It
For this project, we were tasked with creating a visually appealing application as a means of showing new star and planetary system data collected by NASA. Using the data provided by NASA, we instantiated both a 2D view of these systems in comparison to each other and to our own solar system, as well as an orbiting 3D version. For the sake and scale of this project, we decided to only show planetary systems with 4 or more planets because many systems in the data set only contained one known planet.
In our project, the user is able to toggle between different viewing modes such as 2D, 3D, Info, Compare, and Special Systems. In 2D, the user is presented with a list of planetary systems, and the user can click on a system and jump to its position in 3D. In both 2D and 3D modes, if you move closer to the planets, you will start to see their names and information such as the discovery method for that planet detailed by the dataset provided by NASA. The user can also decide to see both 2D and 3D modes at the same time. So far, we are able to change the planet and orbit size via controller buttons (menu buttons on the VIVE controllers). The speed can be changed in the keyboard interactive version of the application.
Some Interesting Findings
Reading in the data and using it for our visualization, we found some odd information about the planetary systems that led us to believe that we were reading in the data incorrectly. Most systems we found had planets that were clustered very close to the stars. We weren't sure if this was a mistake in conversion (the data set had values in km) or if that's just really how those systems are. We also found that the many of the obtained planets had very fast revolution speeds in comparison to our solar system. Many of them also had huge planets in them, some doubling and tripling the size of our own Jupiter.
Assets
Most objects in this application are instantiated at start. Below are details about extra textures we obtained.
3. Blue Texture
4. Sand Texture
