A Virtual Martian Colony Will Be Available For Everyone To Explore For Free

Just days prior to the first NASA human spaceflight mission involving a commercially produced spacecraft, an ambitious web development project was announced. Nexus Aurora is an open-source initiative that seeks to submit a proposal to The Mars Society as part of a colony design competition. NASA is currently making progress on Project Artemis, which will put astronauts once again on the surface of the Moon, but the ultimate goal is to start gaining experience for the future "terraforming" of the Red Planet.

The Nexus Aurora project essentially consists of a virtual reality experience to show what a Martian colony for a million residents would look like. The foundations of this VR project are HTML5 and the Unity 3D gaming platform. The volunteers working on the project meet on Discord and GitHub channels to discuss matters related to coding, rendering, and animating the numerous assets that will be used for the VR experience.

Needless to say, the choice of HTML5 for this project is related to the ultimate intention, which is to share the final product with the entire world through a web browser. As for Unity, it is a popular 3D engine that many developers are familiar with; moreover, it offers plenty of VR functionality that other engines such as Godot do not have. The VR software development kit within Unity has quite a few libraries geared towards web presentation and interaction; this is pretty much the same SDK used by the Unreal engine, which happens to be the leading VR platform for gaming in 2020.

Some of the progress already made in the Nexus Aurora project includes futuristic building materials such as fiber boards made of basalt and "marscrete," a Martian version of concrete made with rocks and minerals already collected by the Curiosity rover and analyzed by NASA petrologists. Since construction is expected to be highly modular, many of the assets rendered thus far are for universal connector pods.

Naturally, this project will be one of many that will provide NASA scientists with ideas as to how a Mars colonization mission could unfold. These projects are part of planning, but they are the earliest steps of a process that will take decades. For more information click here https://i.redd.it/fsfmdwsm3q051.png.