Abstract:

A new immersive 3D experience has been created to let the public experience the scope and scale of major telescopes and space missions. Visitors explore the virtual reality (VR) world through the first-person view of an avatar surrounded by mountains and below a realistic starry sky. The experience includes large telescopes built at the University of Arizona, along with planetary missions and space telescopes suspended above the sky platform. Billboards and posters describe the facilities and their science goals, so the tour can be self-guided. The environment was built with Epic Games’ 3D visualization engine, the same engine behind the popular online video game Fortnite. It is delivered using an Oculus Quest headset tethered to a laptop gaming computer, or at somewhat lower resolution using standalone headsets. Facilities in the 3D experience include the 6.5-meter MMT, the 2 x 8.4-meter Large Binocular Telescope, a 15-meter radio dish from the Event Horizon Telescope, and the Giant Magellan Telescope, which has an equivalent diameter of 24.5-meters and will soon be the largest telescope in the world. The Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope are both represented. Many of the 3D models are animated, showing slewing of the large optical telescopes, deployment of lasers for guiding, and unfurling of the solar panels of the James Webb Space Telescope. Planetary probes include the HiRISE orbiter and the Phoenix lander, set on a Martian landscape, and OSIRIS-REx, shown near a detailed, suitably scaled model of the 500-meter Bennu asteroid. The exhibit has been deployed at SXSW 2022 in Austin and at a fund-raising event in Washington, DC. It can readily be expanded with additional 3D models or customized for other major observatories. Virtual reality gives public participants an immersive and visceral sense of cutting-edge astronomy facilities and allows them to visit major telescopes that they could not visit in the real world.

Keywords:

Technology, virtual reality, education, astronomy.