Inspiration
We're a couple of CS majors that wanted to collaborate on a hackathon project as a team. The space theme inspired us to make a navigation system that allowed the user to travel through the solar system, viewing stats about each planet along their journey.
What it does
The opening main menu allows the user to travel around the solar system in a spaceship, learning about each planet along their journey in a concise and user-friendly interface. The main menu also shows a simulated real-time map of planetary location. The user can then click their desired planet and see specific information about that planet.
How we built it
We built the project using a game engine, Unity, powered by C# to connect our graphics and music to the environment based system. We produced our music with GarageBand, and our graphics with Adobe Photoshop. We also used Google Cloud to host our web server, connecting it to the domain www.spacenav.tech, provided by Domain.com. We also used The Solar System OpenData to use real-life data in our simulation of planetary locations.
Challenges we ran into
We had a lot of issues with being able to properly parse the JSON files within C#/Unity. We also had an extremely hard time refactoring our Python scripts that retrieved data from the Solar System OpenData API into C# for Unity to be able to use.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are extremely proud to present a working project. We were able to successfully collaborate as a team to carry out tasks that led to the success of our project. Most notably, our project uses real time data to map out the real locations of the planets in the main menu. By creating a web server, we made our educational simulator accessible to a broader audience.
What we learned
We learned the importance of communication between our backend group and our frontend group. Without proper communication, this finalized version of this project would not be here. We also learned new languages and technologies, such as C# and cloud hosting.
What's next for SpaceNav
We are excited to announce that the next DLC for SpaceNav is going to be NFT integration. SpaceNav to the moon!
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