What you need to know: The first Early Access release of MarsVR, showcasing the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station, is now available to the general public. MarsVR is listed in the Steam directory of VR applications, the main VR content platform, and supports most major brands of VR headsets. This version of MarsVR is a guided tour of the campus and surrounding terrain. Future versions will add building interiors including objects used in analog space missions as well as… READ MORE >
Topic Area: MarsVR
We invite you to watch a video report by James L Burk, our new Executive Director, about his first full month in the role. The five-minute video lists a number of key accomplishments achieved since January 1st, such as the announcement of our Telerobotic Mars Expedition Design Competition (TMEDC). James also outlines plans and initiatives for next month, including the official public release of our Mars VR Virtual Reality project. To watch the new video report, please click here. This… READ MORE >
The Mars Society’s MarsVR team has released a “Coming Soon” trailer for its MDRS Virtual Reality environment, to be hosted on Steam in the near future. The goal of the MDRS VR project is to create a special training environment for MDRS (Mars Desert Research Station) crew members and the general public in order to learn more about Mars analog science, technology, and procedures. The MarsVR team has been working since 2018 on a digital twin of the real-life MDRS facility located in southern… READ MORE >
Come join our Red Planet Live video podcast on Tuesday, September 14th at 6:00 pm Pacific / 9:00 pm Eastern for an amazing look inside the awesome technology that the Mars Society is working on! During the first half of the show, Ron Craig will be interviewing James Burk, Mars Society IT Director, about some of the technology initiatives that he and his team are spearheading, including the MarsVR project, the innovative aspects of the organization’s virtual convention scheduled for… READ MORE >
Greetings MarsVR Backers & Crowdexplorers! As part of the promotion of our ongoing MarsVR crowdfunding campaign, the Mars Society is releasing new 3-D models of its Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah that have been captured by our team as part of the MarsVR project. We are releasing the first new model, which is an annotated view of the entire MDRS campus exterior. This is now live on Sketchfab, a 3-D modelling site, and we plan to make it available… READ MORE >
The Mars Society, the world’s largest space advocacy organization dedicated to the human exploration and settlement of the planet Mars, is pleased to announce its new Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for our Mars Virtual Reality (MarsVR) project. Project Goals Our project will deliver a stunning Mars experience to schools, museums, the public and our future space explorers. The goals of the project are to create a high-quality virtual reality simulation of future human exploration of the Red Planet, as a tool… READ MORE >
The Mars Society is pleased to announce that a special panel discussion entitled Virtual Reality & Mars will be held at the 21st Annual International Mars Society Convention on Saturday, August 25th (11:30 am) at the Pasadena Convention Center. A five-person panel will give a presentation about the Mars Society’s new MarsVR program and how virtual reality has quickly become a serious research tool to support and promote planning for human Mars exploration. Supported through a recent crowdfunding campaign, the… READ MORE >
The Mars Society is pleased to report that a technical team visiting the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah as part of the preparation for the MarsVR program has completed all of its virtual scans ahead of schedule. Fully-funded by a May 2018 Kickstarter campaign, MarsVR will provide a fully interactive virtual reality platform for serious research to support human Mars exploration and pre-sim crew training. Over 15,000 high-resolution photos of the terrain around the MDRS facility have been… READ MORE >
Thanks to your help, we are very happy to announce that late last night the Mars Society reached (and surpassed) its MarsVR Kickstarter goal of $27,500!! There are new stretch goals available to boost our MarsVR project and its scope even further, with a few days still remaining in the Kickstarter campaign. If we raise $35,000, we will increase the amount of terrain we will have in the Phase 1 virtual environment by 25%. That means instead of one square… READ MORE >
Hello Everyone, Virtual Reality and the creation of VR tools to support the human exploration of Mars is a strategic focus of The Mars Society. We intend to demonstrate the potential of VR to allow millions of people to directly participate in Mars exploration. Our VR tools will support the training of our crews at the Mars Desert Research Station, promote STEM education, and will help instill broad public support of human Mars exploration. To this end, we have established… READ MORE >
The Mars Society is pleased to report some very exciting news! Our organization’s IT Director James Burk was informed today by Kickstarter that our new MarsVR program has been selected as a “Project We Love.” Kickstarter is now featuring our MarsVR campaign prominently on their platform. You can now see the “Project We Love” badge on our Kickstarter page, and we are one of the top featured projects in their Technology/Space Exploration category, which you can access using this link…. READ MORE >
For the first time ever, the Mars Society is offering a very unique opportunity to the general public – to serve as an actual crew member during a simulation at its Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in southern Utah. Crew members are typically recruited by the Mars Society from a large pool of interested researchers, educators and students, requiring all potential candidates to go through a standardized process similar to a college or job application. The Mars Society is currently raising… READ MORE >
In today’s Red Planet Radio podcast (episode 20), we speak with James Burk, the Mars Society’s IT Director and lead manager of the organization’s newest project, MarsVR. In this interview, we discuss the Mars Society’s new MarsVR project, how it differs from the other VR and AR projects out there, photo-grammetry mapping of our Mars Desert Research Station for photo-realistic VR experiences and the organization’s new Kickstarter campaign. For more details about the MarsVR Kickstarter campaign, please visit: www.MarsVR.io…. READ MORE >
The Mars Society, the world’s largest space advocacy group dedicated to the human exploration and settlement of the planet Mars, launched today a Kickstarter campaign to help raise $27,500 for a new open-source virtual reality platform called MarsVR, which will be used for serious research to support the goal of sending humans to the Red Planet. The MarsVR program will be a unique multi-phase effort designed to pioneer the emerging field of CrowdExploration, which we define as the partnership between the… READ MORE >