LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND (AP) – The final frontier has rarely looked closer than that, at least almost.
Researchers at a leading university in Switzerland will launch an open-source beta program on Tuesday that enables virtual tours through the universe, including the International Space Station, beyond the Moon, Saturn or exoplanets and galaxies.
The program, called the Virtual Reality Universe Project (VIRUP), brings together what researchers call the largest dataset in the universe to create 3D panoramic views of space.
Software engineers, astrophysicists, and experts in experimental museology from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, or EPFL, have come together to create a virtual map that can be viewed using individual virtual reality equipment, and immersive systems such as panoramic cinemas with 3D glasses and dome screens. , or simply on a computer for 2D viewing.
“The novelty of this project was to put all the available data in a frame, where we can see the universe at different scales: near us, around the Earth, around the solar system, at the level of the Milky Way, to see through it,” declared Jean-Paul Kneip, director of the Physics Laboratory Astronomical in EPFL, the universe and time to the beginning, what we call the Big Bang.
Think of a kind of Google Earth, but of the universe. Computer algorithms collect terabytes of data and produce images that can appear near a meter, or nearly to infinity, as if you were sitting and looking at the entire visible universe.
VIRUP is available to everyone for free, although it requires at least one computer and is best viewed using virtual reality equipment or 3D capabilities. Its goal is to attract a wide range of visitors, both scientists looking to visualize the data they continue to collect, and large audiences looking to explore the sky virtually.
This is still a work in progress, at the moment the beta version cannot be run on a Mac computer. Downloading software and content can seem overwhelming to less skilled computer users, and space on your computer will be important.
The larger generic version of the content is a smaller version that can be measured in gigabytes, which is kind of the best feature. Astronomers with more computer memory can choose to download more.
The project collects information from eight databases that include at least 4,500 known exoplanets, tens of millions of galaxies, hundreds of millions of space objects in total, and more than 1.5 billion light sources from around the world. Only the Milky Way. But when it comes to potential data, the sky is literally the limit: future databases could include asteroids in our solar system or things like nebulae and pulsars in the galaxy.
There is no doubt that games and representations in virtual reality already exist: apps for observing the universe on tablets make it possible to map the night sky, using close-ups of the stars with magnification; Programs like Russia’s SpaceEngine provide images of the universe; NASA has made smaller scales for virtual reality.
But the EPFL team said that VIRUP goes further and broader: data from sources such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in the United States, the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to map the Milky Way, and its Planck mission to observe the first light of the universe. , grouped together in a single window to obtain the most comprehensive datasets to date.
