Enjoy your ‘Virtual’ tour: ‘Access Mars’ takes you to the rocky, red planet right from your smartphone

Washington, October 23: Mars has always been the planet of human interests. Many numbers of satellites, missions are taken up to study the planet Mars. Ever wondered about visiting ‘Mars’! How small our planet Earth will look if we land on Mars? How higher? Butterflies in your stomach, right? Brace yourselves, because NASA is all set to give you the experience of visiting the Mars and exploring the space. Right here through your smartphone, you can walk on Mars. 

NASA has been offering virtual-reality of Mars for some time. But now with Google’s help, users can experience the actual rusty rocks, bright, chilly and warm surface, all of which were explored first hand by NASA’s Curiosity rover. Google has collaborated with NASA for rolling out a WebVR based website by the name of ‘Access Mars’. This essentially transports users from the realm of imagination to the mind-bending domain of mixed reality. It is crafted using WebVR, a technology that lets users experience virtual reality right in your browser, without installing native apps.

 

‘Access Mars’ lays out a 3D terrain for five spots scanned by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The tour can be experienced via a desktop browser on mobile devices as a head-tracking display seen through a Cardboard-style viewer, and on virtual reality and augmented reality headsets. NASA says the experience was adapted from OnSight software, which is used to help scientist visualise the rover’s surroundings as they plan its route.

"We've been able to leverage VR and AR technologies to take our scientists to Mars every single day," said Victor Luo, lead project manager at JPL's Ops Lab, which led the collaboration. "With Access Mars, everyone in the world can ride along. All along the way, JPL scientist Katie Stack Morgan will be your guide, explaining key points about the rover, the mission, and some of the early findings, Burke added.