NASA's Fantastic Unity Apps

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1

Guys,

I had to share this.

I went to an event here in Austin tonight, Siggraph Austin hosted this as part of South by Southwest Interactive. There were four speakers, one of which was NASA (The United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration).

I’ve long been an advocate of Unity’s amazing power not for games, but for education and business apps. I personally feel that they limit themselves greatly by calling Unity a “Game Engine.” Here’s some great, great stuff that NASA put out, some tools for exploring the Earth and the Solar System. Let your mouse do the walking and post what you think, and where this work takes you:

There’s no tutorial, so it can be a bit difficult to learn your way around, but this app shows hard data in beautiful graphics if you get used to it. Don’t go into full screen. Choose “Atmostphere” at the top, then click on the satellite “Aqua” and under “Show Data Map” choose “Carbon Dioxide - last 31 days” and you will see global carbon dioxide levels over the last 31 days.

Another good example is also under “land” go to “Terra” and under “Show Data Map” choose “Modis Monthly Mosaidx 2004” to see an animation of the surface precipitation.

I will post info on how to use this tool if y’all can’t figure it out. It’s late.

This is not pretty graphics. This is DATA. This is real data compiled by a serious governmental organization with incredible tech and huge funding, presented using Unity. I am a fan. What do you think?

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Oh,that’s a great system. I have worked on a similar project about Earth recently, but quite simple.

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Love it. Great use of Unity; and I don’t think it needs to sell itself as more than a game engine for people to take it beyond traditional gaming applications. In fact, I can see all game development tools as being useful, if not essential, to education.

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I’ve also been long convinced about Unity being more a “virtual worlds” engine than just a games engine, I agree 100%! As my usage knowledge of Unity matures I do intend to expand on the sort of things I do with it, there’s a myriad of businesses out there you could overhaul in fantastic, interactive ways with clever use of this technology! Other engines focus on high-quality visuals but have too much of an FPS bias, from what I’ve seen, so maybe that makes them harder to use for general purpose virtual world interactivity. Being a truly “general purpose” engine is probably Unity’s highest advantage here, along with its multiplatform deployment capability. The NASA app is a great example of the former, totally loved it!

Regards,

  • jmpp