UIU Dequeuers

https://github.com/uiudequeuers/haxoplanet

https://youtu.be/VNuYFanifzk

UIU Dequeuers has four talented individuals working on their "Haxoplanet" from various backgrounds. Haxoplanet will be a tool for more easily experiencing space and its elements.

As we all know playing game is what people of all generations are fond of, especially the younger generation who would carry the torch for astronomy in the future. Though they have a great interests and expectation from space science but in our studies, we found many of them were unable to locate sufficient resources that would enable them to perceive real space and understand how to get data from space materials. Our mind prefer visualization before straight documentation. 

And The Haxoplanet will play its own role!

Haxoplanet will focus on space environment visualization and authentic data showing provided by Nasa. We will use Nasa exoplanet public dataset for this purpose. 

In this game player will operate the James Webb Telescope and will gain the knowledge of how the James Webb Telescope works and the methods scientists use to decide whether a planet is habitable or not in a very interesting way. They will be introduced with some scientific terms such as:

• A spectrograph — sometimes called a spectroscope or spectrometer — breaks the light from a single material into its component colors the way a prism splits white light into a rainbow.
• Direct imaging - It is the only method that directly captures pictures of exoplanets orbiting distant stars. 
• Photometry - in astronomy, the measurement of the brightness of stars and other celestial objects (nebulae, galaxies, planets, etc.). 
• Gravitational microlensing - the gravitational microlensing method allows planets to be found using light from a distant star

this experience will ignite space enthusiasm among students and help them to learn and play about real space science and also stimulate their imagination and creativity. In addition, help them to understand and take measures to protect the world in which we live in.

We have Used Kepler Tabular dataset which is available in Nasa Exoplanet archive. We used already discovered planets mass and radius to determine hoe similar the size is to earth. We also used surface temperature gravity on those planets compared to earth to decide whether human can survive on landing. We also used chemical composition of atmosphere to decide if it has water, carbon-dioxide and other essential compounds for life to exits and thrive. We used other chemical composition of the surface materials to decide the visuals of the planet and procedurally generate them.

I had some excellent team members who were very talented as well as dedicated. 

Words cannot express our friendship but in short, I can sum up saying, we worked as we are one! and to be able to accomplish all of this in less than 12 productive hours was my great start with hackathon.

It all started from my first week at The United International University, in January 2020. It was a welcome week. UIU Robotics, A club for students who are interested in Robotics and other tech stuff from The United International University, had organized their first session of the semester to welcome all members to give introduction of that club too.

There, I heard a lot of new things that I have never heard before, Slack (The group chats application), swags (free give away stuff in hackathon), hackathons, etc.…. One thing I was particularly interested in was hackathon. A very interesting event for all coders, where all participants were called ‘hackers,’ where they ‘hack’ for 24-hours continuously. Back then, I did not understand what hackathon really was. Though, all the pictures and videos about the hackathon event attracted me a lot. It shows people coding, laughing, sleeping on the floor next to their working desks, and pizzas! I felt like I must participate and find out more about it.

I was nervous about joining hackathon. A 48-hour hackathon. It was organized by more than a hundred universities across the World, including my university. Although I was still uncertain about what the Local Hack Day or hackathon was, I decided to attend. There were swags, stickers, snacks, foods provided for us at the site and also there were lot of volunteers to assist us all throughout the time.

At night many of the participants along with us player different type of games, including the mentors.

Many people are extremely interested and have high hopes from space science, but we 

figured out that many of them are unable to find enough resources to help them experience real space and comprehend how to gather data from space materials. This is why we thought of creating this game that would ignite space enthusiasm among people and help them to

understand how James Webb Telescope works.

Our 3D model was created after we had designed our prototype. Haxoplanet would help in providing players with a true sense of the space environment. After that, we calibrated it with the game engine and worked on our logic development and testing with an emphasis on space environment visualization and correct data presentation provided by NASA.

Although we had some calibration problems to convert our design to game environment, it was still an interesting project to work on.

We have used those tools for different reasons:

1. Blender - we drew 3d models (planets, asteroids, universe) using blender
2. Unity 3D - for gaming engine, we use Unity 3D.
3. C# - for logic development in Unity 3D
4. Adobe Photoshop - Universe Image editing
5. Adobe Illustrator - Universe and other components image vector export
6. Adobe Premier Pro - Video editing, Voice addition etc
7. Adobe After Effects - Video Editing
8. Figma - Prototyping
9. Freepic - image collection

We have used several resources for our research:

Open space data searching:

1. https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/index.html
2. https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/API_queries.html
3. https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/program_interfaces.html
4. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/instruments/index.html

James Web Telescope

Webb Space Telescope GSFC/NASA

Planet exploration methods

1. https://www.planetary.org/articles/down-in-front-the-transit-photometry-method
2. https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/discovery/how-we-find-and-characterize

#Space, #game, #3d, #visual, #planet, #universe