Unemployed game designer creates mind-blowing solar system explorer app | Hacker News Reader

Unemployed game designer creates mind-blowing solar system explorer app

venturebeat.com

181 pointsdwynings39 comments

Mojang/Notch should hire him to add his talents to the metaverse of 0x10c. Sounds like a great fit. If not, then maybe for a remake of Elite... :)

Here is a solar system flyby that I crafted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ

It uses time to give the viewer a feel for the expansiveness between the planets.

How could a video that awesome only have 680 views? Makes me wonder what else I'm missing.

edit: Can you explain this line (from the beginning): "Whenever the date flips, it represents the point of least distance between the departure and destination planets."

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Took several weeks to program and render. Getting the atmosphere for Venus and Mars to be so close to photo-realistic was tricky.

I wasn't happy with the way I phrased that line. The dates represent the time at which two planets are at their periapsis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis). This significantly reduces the time to travel between two planets. For the gas giants, this happens once every 172 years (http://tinyurl.com/d6r3rnn).

This is first shown at 3:15 when the date flips from 2153-02-27 to 2154-06-16, which marks the closest date that Mars and Jupiter approach each other. Voyager spacecraft were launched to take advantage of this relatively short distance.

The video is a small part of a longer video I had envisioned to excite kids about space exploration:

https://github.com/thangalin/flyby/wiki/_pages

Got it; thanks. I wasn't aware (til I went back and watched it again) that the text of the date actually flipped. My first thought was, "isn't the date continually flipping?" Now I'm trying to think of alternative ways to phrase that. Maybe something like: "Before departing a planet, the ship will rest until the distance to the next planet is minimized. The date will jump forward to show the time elapsed."

"The ship pauses at each planet until the closest approach of the next planet in the journey" ? "The ship waits at each planet until the next planet comes closest." ?

That is truly humbling! Thank you for this experience.

please accept my upvote as my sign of appreciation!

EDIT: awesome music as well!

This app goes a bit further: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y... (and clearly had more funding) - more applicable to the scientist than the casual user playing around with an app on their ipad

It's very cool and no doubt fun to play with, probably an astronomer would enjoy just panning around. I'm still not sure what the actual scientific use case would be.

Perhaps people planning flybys for Cassini? Or maybe for some Mars planning cases, although most planning is far more quantitative and fine-grained than what that would support.

if the goal is scientific understanding, he is going to have to improve the portrayal of the size of the sun relative to the size of the earth.

Awesome

One thing I really want to see get out of a universe/solar system app, though, is a better sense of scale -- to me, having enlarged planets makes it difficult for me to understand the strength and range of gravity, or the challenges of the distances involved.

Perhaps this could be done by adding a window showed a magnified view of (the) space under the cursor, rather like a telescope/magnifying glass?

Yes! I'm so glad I wasn't the first person so say this - a complete misunderstanding of the scale of the solar system is one of my greatest pet peeves.

Imagine a perfect scale model of the universe where the sun is 4.3 feet in diameter (a foot longer than a meter stick). How big and how far away do you imagine earth to be?

Nobody can intuitively come close to the right answer because there's absolutely no attempt at any level of general education for conveying the scale of things in this realm. The correct answer is precisely 0.476 inches, a little smaller than a dime, and 465 feet away, about two football fields.

This simulation - while cool - at times depicts Jupiter as being twice as big as the sun, but at this scale it would be 5.332 inches in diameter (about the size of a cantaloupe).

At the very least, I'd sleep much better if his "scale" toggle was off by default.

The app creator made the right decision when he defaulted to a false scale. Scale is not the only important thing to convey, one also wants to show relationships and have a model of the whole that fits in a monkey brain.

Also, in this interface, the planets serve as big "buttons" to navigate to a celestial body of interest. So they have to be larger.

The thing would be unusable, and boring, if it showed specks of dust orbiting a mustard seed.

Here's another take on that, a scale model of the solar system that stretches across much of Sweden:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System

The sun is 110 m in diameter ("including corona" they say). A 65 cm Earth is 7.6 km away.

There is a switch to scale to realistic proportions. Actually, there are three separate switches for sun, planets, and moons.

It also features a gravity grid.

So everything you want is already in there?

First impressions can make a huge difference. Especially in the case of the spatial organization of things, they set the frame we use orient ourselves in a broader context.

I should have mentioned that I'd noticed the inclusion of scale-change settings the first time around. But I have strong sense (based in part on years of research in the area) that allowing parts of the environment to change scale arbitrarily (at least early in the user's interaction) will hurt their capacity to form a veridical and long-lasting representation of the organization of space.

Of course, I've never done anything close to this in awesomeness; no doubt there are trade-offs of which I'm unaware.

Have you seen this thing from NASA?

(http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120312.html)

It was posted to HN a while ago here - (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3756044)

(Only got 7 up votes, which is baffling.)

There's also this - (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/23/an...)

Which was posted to HN here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3758047)

It looks better than Celestia[1], but it will need a lot of time to reach the same complexity and data[2].

[1] http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ [2] http://celestiamotherlode.net/

It's a completely different idea. In the article they mention 2 other similar paid apps.

Celestia is quite focused on accuracy and while it has many educational overlays and add-ons, it's a practical tool for astronomy geeks "in the know". It's used by the ESA to interface with their Space Trajectory Analysis tool.

Celestia is free and OSS (GPL). Celestia receives no funding and all support AFAIK has been made in terms of sharing knowledge and source code. Celestia is, in short, an old school pure Open Source project. This has pros and cons, but I'd say it's pretty f*ing amazing.

It's amazing, but I'd much rather fund Celestia than a closed-source semi-competitor that runs only on Windows.

This guy is talented! He needs to get on kickstarter and finance his own project.

He already has an IndieGogo campaign here (http://www.indiegogo.com/Solar-system-educational-program). It has flexible funding so even if he doesn't hit his goal of $8K he'll see some money from it (at the time of this post he's at $1056 with 24 days left).

Or.. you know, just sell it.

If you are into this kind of stuff, check out "Star walk" and especially "Solar walk" for iOS. Probably having seen these apps makes me fail at seeing the mind-blowing part of the app in submission :(

What would really make an app like this awesome for the masses is the ability to alter things. Tweak the curves on orbits and see what would happen, alter the rotation of the planets, drop a new moon in, fire an asteroid at a planet, trigger a solar flare.

I would pay money for an app that lets me live out my devious plans of destroying the solar system.

You want Universe Sandbox: http://store.steampowered.com/app/72200/

Fantastic! I'd buy this. Just spending 6 minutes watching the video made me understand the solar system better!

This is fucking AMAZING!

The music reminds me of the original Homeworld game.

It is pretty neat, but am I the only one (rhetorical - I know I'm not) that finds that music grating? That's of the "spacey" variety that is basically cliche, and the first thing I do (see: a quick Eve online game) is disable music.

I have never played Eve Online - but I played Homeworld I and II and I loved the music... they are quite old - but maybe they pioneered that music style thus my nostalgia for it, while you might find it grating...

Homeworld did not pioneer the 'Ambient' music genre.

What about Microprose's Lightspeed [1]? ;)

[1] http://youtu.be/_q-TgFdVQF4?t=25s

He probably meant ambient music for space. But even that is probably not true.

I hear there is an amazing augmented reality star gazing app called Star Chart for iOS, Android, Nokia and Windows Phone 7 which does something quite similar, although with a slightly different feature set...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.escapistga...

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/star-chart/id345542655?mt=8

instead of porting it to iOS and Android and not knowing how long it will take, port it to WebGL! though it may be harder to monetize :(

But it's written in UE3, which can make iOS and Android games. There might be significant changes to work around the platforms' limitations, but he won't have to do it from scratch. To make it in WebGL / Javascript, I imagine he'd have to rewrite everything.

Nasa's PDS challenge: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852833

Just donated $20, and I'll definitely buy it.

Read a few sci-fi novels where they are describing exactly this kind of stuff on the bridge, this makes them all feel so much real.

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