NASA and Oculus have launched their collaborative project ‘Mission: ISS’ for the Oculus Rift for free and it’s offers a detailed, visually sumptuous virtual reality trip to space that most of us would otherwise never experience.
Virtual Reality’s transportative powers being used to live out experiences most of us will never have in real life is rarely most effective than in the realm of space travel. Given the tiny fraction of Earth’s inhabitants that have (around 500 to date) or ever will venture beyond the planet’s gravitational field, VR can give as what life is like for those brave enough to travel beyond it.
Mission: ISS is the latest VR experience to try to convey what it feels to be an astronaut as the collaborative project between Oculus and NASA attempts to recreate life onboard the International Space Station (ISS) high above Earth’s atmosphere.
According to a blog post from Oculus, the new experience, built for the Rift and Touch motion controllers, uses space station models direct from NASA themselves, while information for enhancing the authenticity of the project were gleaned from conversations with “multiple astronauts and the VR Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.”
This is no Sci-fi action extravaganza though, as the most outrageous tasks you’ll get to fulfil on your virtual extra-terrestrial mission is docking cargo capsules and station maintenance. You do however get to venture beyond ISS itself to experience spacewalks however.
Mission: ISS is available now on Oculus Home for the Rift and Touch (and I’m sure for HTC Vive via Revive either now or soon) for free. It’s well worth checking out even if you posses just a passing interest in the subject matter.