NASA Ames Virtual Planetary Exploration (VPE) Project

Virtual Planetary Exploration

VPE is an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) research project that was designed to allow planetary geologists to conduct "virtual exploration" of the surface of the planet Mars. Terrain data models in VPE are based upon actual digital elevation data returned from Mars to Earth by the Viking I and Viking II satellites (1976-77).

The two images show here are screen dumps from an interactive VR "exploration session" of Mars. These are the views a VPE "virtual explorer" would see inside his or her head-mounted display (we used a Virtual Research LCD Flight Helmet with a Polhemus FasTrak 6 DOF tracker).

The globe image is actually a 3D model of the whole planet (greatly sub-sampled!) with a texture map from an artist-enhanced USGS image of the planet's surface. The other image shows a view of the middle region of Valles Marineris, aka Mariner Valley (near the right center of the globe image). This view is from approximately low satellite orbit altitude. The area viewed in this scene is 1,000 x 800 km. The state of California would easily fit within the area of this scene. This terrain surface was modeled from approx. 250,000 polygons, which were rendered at several frames per second by the VPE system (running on an SGI 4D/440 SkyWriter with VGXT graphics). The height of the terrain surface model has been scaled by a factor of 8. The actual height from valley floor to canyon rim is approx. 4,000 meters (1/2 the altitude of Mt. Everest!). Pseudo-coloring has been used in both images. Color is coded by elevation from dark reddish brown at the lowest elevation to light yellow at the highest.

For answers to your questions about VPE send email to Lew Hitchner, hitchner "at" acm "dot" org. Click here to go to Hitchner VPE publications home page.