NASA Mars XR Competition Phase 2

This is our submission into Phase 2 of the HeroX.com NASA MarsXR competition.

Our winning phase 1 storyboard [Dusty Rescue] involved driving the MMSEV rovers, fixing wheels and towing them back to the habitat, but it turns out that you can't actually drive the rovers in the XOSS VR application. I wanted to stick with the "Dusty Rescue" idea, but it ended up becoming "Dusty Crater" instead. There is a large crater called Belva close to the home location, but I needed something smaller if I was going to have astronauts move around it on foot in EVA suits, while keeping the original "Dusty" concept of measuring how a dust storm impairs spatial reasoning. Now, Belva is where Perseverance and  Ingenuity are now, so I could check out the terrain on a very nice map provided by NASA: [Where Is Perseverance?]

Heading North from Belva, there is a crater that fits my needs perfectly, so that became the focus of the Unreal Engine game that I now had to write.

Going back to the original point of my phase 1 storyboard, I needed a dust storm and something that the player could do in the dust that I could measure. For most of the development, I was working around the idea of collecting rocks from the crater floor. The reason for using the crater is that the rim obscures the view of the horizon and any landmarks, making it easy to become disorientated. After submitting my phase 1 entry, I had seen a very effective demonstration of an app that detects dementia in patients using the concept of path integration. What they do is to direct people around a sparse map by sending them to different locations and causing them to turn and walk different distances. Then they have to see if they can still work out which direction is home.

My revised storyboard was now based around a crater mission when a dust storm hits, requiring the mission to be terminated early due to the visibility problems. However, this is where I realised that the idea of picking up rocks off the crater floor wasn't going to work. I had already done some very good mock-ups and trial runs using some of the special pickup rocks provided, but the whole XOSS simulation is littered with small, medium and large sized rocks so it was impossible to know which rock is the target rock out of thousands that are scenery and can't be picked up. Up to this point I knew which rocks to go for when I played it and they could be highlighted using glowing text, but glowing text is no good if the whole point is that the dust is supposed to lower the visibility. I needed something else.

One of my alternative ideas for a phase 1 storyboard involved the Perseverance Rover being incapacitated with one of the sample return tubes still inside it, requiring the astronaut to disassemble and recover the tube and the sample for analysis. OK then, how about picking up sample tubes? It's not quite following how the sample return idea is supposed to work, as they should have been picked up by a robotic mission before any humans set foot on Mars, but maybe we can stretch a point?

The next morning I went onto the NASA 3D Models website and downloaded their sample return tube model. It had far too many polygons, I re-meshed it, then had to severely fix what I broke, colour it and add a top which was strangely missing. However, I dropped it into the game and it was obvious that it was just the perfect thing to use. It just worked.

OK, in reality it's bigger than a real one would be as they're only 16cm long and this one is about 50% bigger. Then I made task 1, which involves picking up six and placing them in a pile. The dust storm triggers once you arrive at the crater centre, which is where there is a map of the tube locations.

For the second task I pulled out all the stops and added the Centaur rover that I had just figured out how to drive. The idea here was to lead the player away from the crater and down the slope and try to get them lost. It's amazing how easy it is to forget where you left a 500 metre crater when it's dark and you're in the middle of a dust storm wearing an EVA suit. This scenario was inspired by the radial crater traverse from the second EVA of Apollo 14. Shepard and Mitchell got to within 30 metres of the rim of Cone Crater at Fra Mauru without ever knowing how close they were.

So that's how my scenario ended up being played out, but there was one other story line that came from an earlier idea. This is the Gnomon ( γνώμων, from ancient Greek, "one who knows"):

This was used in the Apollo missions for marking samples. The idea is extremely simple. The vertical pole is on a gimbal and weighted so it hangs by gravity. This means that it always points vertically whatever angle you put the tripod feet down. You put it near the sample to be recorded, take a picture and record the time. The gnomon's shadow from the picture can then be used with the time and known position of the moon and Sun to calculate what the orientation of the camera is. Something similar was used by the Mars Insight lander to determine its compass bearing after it landed on Mars, because Mars does not have a magnetic field.

It would have been great to use this more in my scenario, but it was just too complicated to work it into the game in the development time remaining. I left it in, though, and you can still see it in the video at the second tube location. You can use it as a marker if you want.

So, that's it. That's five months of my life and I'm now just waiting for the results which are released in early October. Honestly, I don't mind if I don't win anything, I'm just happy to have written a game in Unreal Engine. It's been several decades since I wrote a game and I rather enjoyed it.