Kickin it for NASA

So a very late update for this one – mind you that depends on how you look at things, for me the NASA Space Apps experience is still far from over.
We still have 12 weeks of MoonshotX to go, a day of Academy Xi and a weekend of Coder Factory Academy to work our way through, and Global Judging is only 6 days away :O

To say this has been an experience and a thrill ride is an understatement. It’s all thanks to AIE (The Academy of Interactive Entertainment), where i study, for sending me down to Sydney to compete, and my great team Craig Bentick and Ryan Whitmore for knuckling down with me when knuckling down was needed, and shenanigans and laughs when S&L was needed. Also my amazing wife for playing team support and pep talk queen. She called us the winners before we even arrived in Sydney and would not let up the whole weekend. XD

The video above is our global submission for our project that we made in 48hours (24hours of actual hard coding). It is a Google Daydream VR data visualisation tool, but it goes much further than that.

Our ultimate goal is to develop this into a great learning and curiosity tool, one where you can put it on, and bring up an area of interest such as, say, dinosaurs. Then you can choose Triceratops for example and lights will appear on earth, showing locations that Triceratops have been discovered. You could hover over a point to see a photo of the fossil find, and some associated data. Click the archaeologists name in that box, and bam! more data points appear showing points of interest surrounding that person, such as other finds, their university, birthplace and so on.

In this way, learning and curiosity could become all absorbing, natural and intuitive. It would create a learning space that kids would not want to leave. This is where we hope this project can go 🙂

At present, it is as it was when we left the hackathon. You can display data, play with time, and overlay information to observe correlations. Feel free to try it out on any Google Daydream compatible device. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Download Here! (Android .apk)