NASA finds real uses for VR and AR in astronomy and engineering

Years after the advent of decent VR hardware, there are still precious few ways the technology has been employed as anything other than a game or gimmick. One team at NASA, however, has been assembling useful science and engineering applications, with promising and unique results.

Studying the astronomical number of stars in our galaxy is generally done using legacy tools, scattered databases, perhaps even paper and pencil. And as such it can be hard to use that great multi-purpose pattern recognition engine, the human brain, to full effect on the information. Tom Grubb, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has felt for years that VR and AR are valuable tools for exploring and working with this type of data, and his team has just presented its first paper directly resulting from using those technologies.

He and his colleagues used a VR environment to examine an animated stellar neighborhood, and arrived at a novel classification for a star group other astronomers disagreed on. Being able to intuitively observe the stars’ paths and positions in a three-dimensional space provided the key insight.

“Planetariums are uploading all the databases they can get their hands on and they take people through the cosmos,” said astronomer Marc Kuchner in a NASA news post. “Well, I’m not going to build a planetarium in my office, but I can put on a headset and I’m there.” Grubb and the team have created a number of software projects to help bring not just astronomical databases, but engineering work into VR. Just as heavy industry is learning to incorporate VR and AR into their safety, maintenance and training routines, NASA is looking into it in engineering and cross-site collaboration.

Part of that is just establishing basic tools for viewing and manipulating the data. “The hardware is here; the support is here. The software is lagging, as well as conventions on how to interact with the virtual world,” Grubb explained. “You don’t have simple conventions like pinch and zoom or how every mouse works the same when you right click or left click.”