The VR laboratory
Our team @ VR-Dynamix worked on this project till 2021. Our company partnered with the "Deutsches Museum" in Munich, Germany to create a VR experience of historical events. This post will focus on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The complete application can only be viewed in Munich:
https://www.deutsches-museum.de/museumsinsel/programm/programm-a-z/vrlab
As a user you can currently visit 5 different experiences, including:
-"The moon mission, Apollo17" [ This Post ]
-"Worlds first car, the Benz-Wagen"
-"The Sulzer steam engine"
-"The first human flight of Otto Lilienthal"
and a simulation that lets you drive the moon rover yourself, with a device that combines with the VR goggles and lets you feel the bumpy ride over the moon's surface.
My role mainly involved designing and creating art for the environments (like the moons surface here) and the big Sulzer steam engine (another level).
Also visit the VR-Dynamix homepage: https://vr-dynamix.com/
The Apollo 17 vr experience is a hands on education about everything that happened on the moon during this mission.
The astronauts reported that the sun and the reflected light are so bright that it's impossible to see the stars. That's why we created a totally black sky.
It was a part of my job to do research about the geological formations and fit them into our landscape according to the photos while maintaining a high performance.
We even indulged in a little movie reference.
This is a little teaser captured in VR. Even though playing golf on the moon was not a thing during Apollo 17 (but rather Apollo 14), we decided to bring it in. It provides a great sense of the much lower gravity on the moon. Well, and it's fun too.
In addition to the screenshots I rendered a few short clips just for fun.