This project is solving the Curiosity at Home challenge.

[email protected] is a cooperative game aimed at interesting the public to the operations of Curiosity on Mars. With this game, the players will experience the daily work of scientists and engineers in charge of curiosity operations. The objective is two-fold:
- Increase the interest of the public, not only for the major events of the space mission (launch, landing on mars, main events announced by NASA) but also for the "routine" operations.
- Use this game as a starting point in order to stimulate curisosity or develop educational activities.

The game scenario is derived from three main features of the MSL mission:
1) The team work with a very large team of scientists and engineers : selection of the scientific targets, consensual decision-making within a large team.
2) The "real time" dimension : jet lag (e.g. between California and France), "count-down" dimension each day for the upload of the mission plan, 24/7 constraints and differences in day lengths on Earth and Mars.
3) External events (failures, solar storms, conjonctions, new discoverys) with impact on the planned mission.

These three ingredients, in particular the time constraints, will enable the playful dimension of the game, while bringing a true educational dimension.

The uniqueness of the concept is to mix the web-based game with a real rover moving in a realistic environment (augmented reality), the "dome", built from real images and data collected by Curiosity or MRO. Compared to existing apps (such as Mobile Mars!), the innovation in [email protected] is the collaborative game, based on tools also used by scientists for real operations (skype, shared documents, etc.)

The rover can be a reduced scale mock-up or a full-scale rover (such as the one developed by IRAP and CNES and located in Toulouse) or even, if NASA is interested, the engineering model based in Pasadena. We can also image a tribe of rovers (such as Opportunity and Curiosity) in order to increase the cooperation dimension.

We are looking for cooperations with other teams working on rovers, real or virtual. We would like to connect also a 3D model in its environment). We welcome any contributions in this field, if the proposed solution can be easily interfaced with a web-based application.

The fact that our game concept combines a web-based cooperative game and a real rover allows to involve a large number of internauts in the game sessions and to organise also specific events in locations where the dome and the rover is temporarly installed. Another possible use is a specific session with a set of classrooms cooperating as team of scientists.

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Project Information

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0
Source Code/Project URL: https://github.com/SpaceAppsChallengeToulouse/CuriosityAtPlay_Android

Resources

Pictures from Toulouse challenge and focus on [email protected] - https://picasaweb.google.com/114845393476987728419/InternationalSpaceAppsChallengeToulouseCuriosityPlay?authuser=0&feat=directlink
[email protected] coming alive : pieces of apps... - https://picasaweb.google.com/114845393476987728419/InternationalSpaceAppsChallengeCuriosityPlayBuildingOurApps?authuser=0&feat=directlink
[email protected]: Project presentation on Slideshare - http://www.slideshare.net/RegardSurTerre/curiositygame
Collaborative sofware for scientific mission planning - https://github.com/SpaceAppsChallengeToulouse/CuriosityAtPlay
[email protected] on Prezi - http://prezi.com/2-lly8tagazj/curiosity-play/?kw=view-2-lly8tagazj&rc=ref-38695869
A short video: demo of Curiosity mission planning - http://youtu.be/bGUI4lI8pSA
A short video: MMI for the scientific missions - http://youtu.be/83yzpY6lmMM
A new gallery with the photos of the oral presentations - https://picasaweb.google.com/114845393476987728419/InternationalSpaceAppsChallengeLeJury?authuser=0&feat=directlink