What it does
Solar Explorer is a Oculus Rift educational tool which enables students to view the positions of the solar system's objects both in real-time, and at any time between 3000BC and 3000AD.
It utilises a range of cutting-edge visual technologies including Oculus Rift, VR-Boilerplate, and Three.JS alongside data from Skyfield to create a fully 3D environment containing orbits and information about each planet.
We developed this in 36 hours, as part of Manchester Spring GreatUniHack 2016.
How we built it
We firstly found an appropriate API, to get the positions of planets for a given time. From this we parsed the data into a JSON format. Using this data structure, we passed it into a WebGL instance to provide the arguments for creating accurately sized planets, and used various mesh technologies to overlay maps of the planets onto the spheres.
Challenges we ran into
One of our API's for mobile Virtual Reality, BoilerPlate-VR, was partially incomplete and lacked several key function calls which required significant workarounds.
In addition, no-one in our group had large amounts of experience with Javascript; which we used as a key component of our program.
In the final hours, a Git merge caused us to lose significant parts of our code-base.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our progress and the workflow manner we adopted was efficient.
What we learned
We learnt large amounts of Javascript syntax, as well as Node.JS backend and how to use JSON to parse data in a clean and fast manner.
What's next for solar-explorer
We aim now to recover our lost work, and develop the application further.
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