NASA-backed ‘Mars 2030’ is a Breathtakingly Real Slice of Martian Landscape the Size of ‘Skyrim’

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Backed with support from NASA, the development of Mars 2030 is underscored by a singular mission: do everything possible to make the player feel like they’re actually on Mars. And that, apparently, means starting with a massive, detailed recreation of an actual part of the planet’s surface.

I’m fascinated with space, and by extension, Mars. I’ve seen Mars through a telescope. I’ve shot amateur astrophotos of Mars. I’ve looked at topographical maps of Mars. I’ve even gazed upon the real surface of Mars in VR, from a panoramic photo taken by the Curiosity rover and viewed through Gear VR.

But it wasn’t until Mars 2030 that I felt, however briefly, that I was actually standing on Mars.

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It’s incredibly hard to describe, but anyone interested in space surely knows the feeling; that fleeting moment where for just an instant, you grasp the absurd scale of the cosmos and your minute role within it. If there’s a name for the feeling I do not know it, but I do know that I can occasionally invoke it with a video like this, and I also now know that Mars 2030 has the same power.

The feeling came when I was standing atop a rocky outcropping not far from the white capsule-shaped habitat that functions as a sort of home base in Mars 2030. As I raised my head to take inventory of the landscape, stretched out before me I saw boulders, valleys, and lowlands which eventually ended hundreds of kilometers away in a massive mountainscape. Above that was the Sun, but unlike I’d ever seen it.

At about 40% as bright as the Sun seen from Earth, the Sun on Mars looked smaller and felt more distant. About 20 degrees above the horizon, it was tinted a faint red as its light passed through the thin Martian atmosphere. It was at this moment—staring at the Sun and the realistic way it reflected from the landscape—that the feeling washed over me: this is what the Sun would look like if I was actually standing in this spot on Mars. In that moment I felt further away from the Sun than I ever have here on Earth… and that made me feel like I was actually standing there on the Red Planet.

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But it didn’t last long… it never does; no matter how long I try to cling to that space-induced feeling of awe, it’s but a ghost passing through me. Still, the fact that I felt it at all meant that developer FUSION Media had achieved what they’d set out to do with Mars 2030.

“We want you to feel like you’re standing on mars,” said Justin Sonnekalb, a game designer working on the Mars 2030 project. “We want you to feel like you’re actually there.”

Making Mars

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To give players the feeling of being on the planet, the team went to the group that knows Mars best: NASA. The space agency agreed to collaborate on the project, opening an official channel to share technical expertise and “the results of ongoing studies on space transportation systems, concepts of operations, and human health and performance,” wrote NASA in the announcement of the project late last year. “While still early in formulation, this partnership makes possible the first virtual reality Mars surface experience using actual operational and hardware concepts that NASA and MIT are studying today.”

Mars 2030 doesn’t just look like Mars, it’s a recreation of an actual region of the planet with a player-accessible area of 20 sq km, about the size of Skyrim (2011), Sonnekalb told me. The total visible area, which includes the distant mountains that I saw, stretches much further… more than 700 km of real geometry from one size to the other.

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To create this plot of Mars, Fusion borrowed measurements of the planet’s surface from NASA. The player-accessible space is based on topographical data that’s sampled every meter and is accurate to within 30 cm of the actual elevation. The larger visible area is based on data from the Mars Express orbiter, sampled every 50 meters with accuracy down to one meter, Sonnekalb said.

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With the data in hand, the team set off to create the space, but it takes more than topographical data alone to make a compelling recreation of an actual planet.

“Our lead environment artist actually worked with a NASA geologist to find the correct reflectance factors to really get the materials to be as photorealistic as possible,” said Sonnekalb. “We use UE4’s physically-based rendering for everything.”

The scale and visual fidelity of Mars 2030 is something never done before in VR, says NVIDIA’s Zvi Greenstein, GM of GeForce Desktop, who has been working closely with Fusion on the project.

“You basically have the real Martian terrain… the real topography with rocks… the lightning model is accurate, the gravity model is accurate… the development team recorded the actual sound from the rover,” Greenstein told me. “The rover, the habitat [modules], the labs… whatever you see in this application is based on actual CAD models provided by NASA…”

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The development team is building Mars 2030 from as much real data as they can, and they are highlighting that attention to detail by designing for the absolute upper-tier of enthusiast graphical hardware: dual NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti GPUs.

“We’re pushing 50 million polygons per frame,” Greenstein said, though he also mentioned that they plan to scale things down so that the experience can still run on more common VR hardware like the GTX 970.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • visual

    Anyone else find it numerous that someone already took the name Mars 2030 on Steam?

  • REP

    If you’re development for Vive, why wouldn’t you want to use motion controller? It doesn’t make sense to use gamepad.

    • Harry Hol

      To support both, they need to go with the sure thing.

      • Massimo

        “Thanks Oculus…”

        • yag

          Yeah thanks Oculus because we probably wouldn’t have the Vive without them.

          • JoeD

            Boy do you fanboys love to give credit where its not due. Sorry, but both Valve had been working on VR before that Palmer kid got involved.

            http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/18/htc-vive-an-oral-history/

            “But while all of this was happening, Valve was already at work on its own solution.”

            What you wouldn’t have is Oculus giving a shite about room scale and motion control.

          • yag

            I already answered to one, I won’t feed another one, sorry.

  • TaxPayer

    I want this

  • Leo Richard Comerford

    NASA’s been working on this idea for quite a long time: https://youtu.be/JRMrplVubVI?t=357 .

  • bladestorm91

    I hope there’s going to be more AEIOU

  • jlschmugge

    On why they aren’t using “comfort” crap: “Breaks the immersion”. I just fell in love with this developer. Not to mention a VR Mars simulation based on real data is a fantasy come to life.

  • Mike

    These are some of the most realistic visuals I’ve ever seen rendered in realtime. Most of the time it’s hard to even tell it’s not real.

  • Graham J ⭐️

    “they plan to scale things down so that the experience can still run on more common VR hardware like the GTX”

    The most common VR hardware is a Samsung phone. Hopefully they will scale it down enough to run on Gear VR so we don’t need $2k of equipment to view it.

    • yag

      Most common VR hardware ON PC. You won’t have this kind of open-world experience on mobile. Not before long…

    • JoeD

      They didn’t say MOST common, they said MORE common. If they scale it down for the Gear you’ll be looking at a mostly flat plane. Fun.

      • Graham J ⭐️

        I wasn’t nit picking semantics, I just meant that 970-level GPUs are still a relative rarity compared to mobile VR systems so it would be good for viewership if they could stream lower poly versions. Render distance would suffer for sure but nearby meshes could still be decent.

        • NeoTechni

          Hell, I have a 650Ti

  • Skies on Mars are blue, just like the Earth, unless there is alot of dust in the air. Well Mars does have dust storms on a global level on occasions, it’s not always “dusty” out. I’m not sure why NASA likes to put out these “Always Orange” pictures, other then it’s something the public expects, and people have accused them of faking their pictures. In their actual color, it kinda looks like high deserts on Earth, not very “otherworldly”.

    And the blueshift isn’t cause by water in the atmosphere, on Earth or anywhere else. Atmospheric gases, well transparent, still scatter light.

  • metanurb

    Sunset’s on Mars are blue tinted. It’s the one thing that annoyed me a bit in “The Martian” movie lol. And now maybe also this “Mars 2030”, unless they fix it (but I’ll still look forward to testing it, hope it works with DK2 as well, though maybe not without those Oculus controllers?)

    From the all-knowing wikipedia:

    “Around sunset and sunrise the Martian sky is pinkish-red in color, but in the vicinity of the setting sun or rising sun it is blue. This is the exact opposite of the situation on Earth. However, during the day the sky is a yellow-brown “butterscotch” color.[3] On Mars, Rayleigh scattering is usually a very small effect. It is believed that the color of the sky is caused by the presence of 1% by volume of magnetite in the dust particles. Twilight lasts a long time after the Sun has set and before it rises, because of all the dust in Mars’s atmosphere. At times, the Martian sky takes on a violet color, due to scattering of light by very small water ice particles in clouds”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy_on_Mars

    Another link:

    http://www.universetoday.com/120353/what-makes-mars-sunsets-different-from-earths/

    • Albert Walzer

      i also read somewhere (back in the time when the first two rovers were fresh) that everything on mars looks very desaturated in reality. They always had mentions on their fotos, too that they are recolored for “earthlike” light, because the real photos border on black and white or something. It would be really cool if the devs would include a “real mode” with all those aspects in mind….

  • RoJoyInc

    I’d buy another 980ti if the software is REALLY REAL. I want the ultimate experience.

  • Geffen Avraham

    Dual GTX 980 Tis? Who do they think will buy this?

  • Jens

    Soo, what happened? Why is it not released yet? Was it cut ?