THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Want to know what it feels like walking on the moon? Bringing this experience live is a team of youngsters from TCS incubation lab who have built a hardware-backed device which lends one a feel of walking on the moon and maneouvering through the craters. The device, according to the members, can be tied to the leg. The application is developed by VR Explorers founded by Urja Solanki, Akhil Guthula and Robin Tomy of TCS incubation lab in the capital.
The trio wanted to bring this unique experience to the public. “Till now, there was no sense of connection with the moon. We wanted people to get a first-hand experience and even educate them about its various facets,” said Robin Tomy, one of the founders.
The application is designed on the concept of ‘learning with exercise’. The motion sensors, backed with the Samsung S9 hardware,are attached to ones leg. As you walk, the virtual reality experience helps you see the craters. A box of information on the craters crop up alongside. The images of the craters have been sourced from NASA which is update with new picturers of the moon.
“We also added a IoT based movement tracking in the VR environment and dynamic environment update. We created an immersive, interactive and dynamic VR learning app using the 3D models from Nasa,” said Robin.Apart from the winning entry in the NASA Spaceup Challenge where they showcased the model, they also participated in challenges such as Design by Nature category where they created a robotic design for the debris affected areas on the surface of the space shuttle.
They also developed another application where they included a checklist of item generation based on type of the disaster.Last year, over 25,000 people developed and submitted more than 2,000 projects at the annually held hackathon weekend in response to challenge statements created by NASA.
VR Explorers is now working on new projects on virtual reality and how it can be made more learning-oriented.