Awards & Nominations
Spaced Out has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Finalists Honorable Mentions
Liberty: Experience the ISS like never before.
High-Level Project Summary
Current resources for the ISS are scattered across multiple official websites, and it makes it tedious to learn about the ISS's innovations and the like for any casual enthusiast--given how incredible the ISS is, technologically and in international cooperation, such barriers shouldn't exist.Our product 'Liberty' alludes to the ISS's origins as space station Freedom: we aim to make learning about the accessible far more accessible. We offer a speedy web application which can be run on any device, even with internet disconnected. Liberty allows users to learn more about the past and present of ISS, and track the ISS passing over their heads, which makes it feel real and is very cool.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Firstly, we allow the user to track the ISS passing over their heads for a truly immersive experience; next, they can view the ISS move through history, from the launch of its first module Zarya to its current form with 16 unique and incredible modules; and finally, to read more about each experiment and module onboard in detail, and information on each astronaut who's ever visited.
We've also optimized 3D models severely through remeshing and other methods (reducing poly-count by ~15x and file size by ~50x), and also used WASM to accelerate operations that need to occur on every frame for the model viewer screens (from 0.3ms to ~15ns).
Software: Blender3D, Visual Studio Code, Arc Browser, Figma
Coding Languages: JavaScript, Typescript, Rust (WASM)
Libraries/frameworks: Next.js, Cesium, React
Hardware: Macbook Air M2
Space Agency Data
https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/ : 3D models and textures
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/overview/index.html : to learn more about ISS to tailor our product to requirements
Hackathon Journey
In a word: liberating.
As avid space and computers enthusiasts and artists, we have always tried to express our interests in STEM and beyond in new ways to have fun and make interesting things. However, this project was special for us: we could express our creativity, while working with tech, for an application focused on showing the wonders of space exploration. We felt truly free while working on the different aspects of our challenge, while collaborating with each other and allowing our collective creativity to flourish.
Through this project, we learned a lot relating to various technical tools and paradigms; a non-exhaustive list includes, how to highly optimize compute operations at the browser-level, how to optimize 3D models, how to ensure their format matches what the loader expects, how to use various interesting programming libraries, and other things we've picked up along the way. But much more than that, we learnt how to work effectively together, take care of the team and our project at the same time, pool our creativity together, and how to survive a 24-hour hackathon (hint: a part of the answer involves a lot of coffee).
We faced some issues in communication, sometimes it was because of physical barriers and sometimes the barriers were mental. But above all, since we all had deep trust in each other, we were able to work through it and end up making something amazing which we're all really proud of.
We would like to thank the Galgotia's College of Engineering and Technology and the students who have worked tirelessly to host our local event. We would not be here without their efforts and would have never had this incredible opportunity. We would also like to thank NASA, ISRO, and other parties involved in organizing the challenge for inspiring millions like us every year, to look beyond the ground and straight at the stars above, undauntingly.
References
https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/stations.txt
https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/
https://cesium.com/
Tags
#visualization #exploration #space #iss #spacestation #international #nasa #esa #jaxa #orbit #globe