Inspiration
Many constellations are only visible at certain times of the year for certain latitudes, for a few hours each evening. In addition, light pollution in urban cities and limited access to a telescope can make astronomy inaccessible to many people.
VR makes a difference. A VR astronomy lesson is available to anyone regardless of where they live. Whether in a rural, urban, northern, equatorial, or southern hemisphere home, StellarScope can widen everyone’s horizons.
What it does
StellarScope is an immersive, interactive VR astronomy lesson for beginners. Players learn about convex, flat, and concave lenses, and how telescopes use lenses to bend light and magnify images. Players can connect the individual components to assemble a telescope. By looking through this telescope, players can view and learn about the constellations.
How we built it
January 25: Team formation, brainstorming, scoping, and scheduling January 26: Learning Unity and Blender, setting up the VR environment, writing the script for the project January 27: Coding the lens optics, coding the telescope interior, coding the telescope assembly, finding and editing audio, learning Audacity. January 28: Coding the constellation scene, fixing bugs, learning Premier, making the video.
Challenges we ran into
Learning Unity from scratch was the biggest challenge by far–we often ran into bugs, coding issues, sync issues, and Github issues. By having one person work on the main Unity project, two people work on developing assets on different computers, and two people working on scripting, audio editing, graphic design, and logistics, we created an efficient workflow.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to complete 99% of the things we said we wanted to accomplish. We created our project concept, timeline, and tasklist on the first day. We followed our timeline accurately.
Our team values accessibility, and StellarScope makes astronomy accessible to everyone–narration is provided through both text and audio.
What we learned
Most of the team learned every tool from scratch, including Unity, Adobe Premiere, Blender, Figma, ElevenLabs, and Audacity.
Many people in the team also learned about optics, telescopes, and constellations from scratch!
What's next for StellarScope: Connecting with the Cosmos
We’re planning to reach out to astronomy classes and astronomy clubs around the country. One of our team members is a former astronomy club president, and can spread the VR game throughout a network of students. If the game continues to be successful, we’ll send it to libraries with VR headsets so it’s accessible to members of the public.
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