This project is solving the The Blue Marble challenge.

Who are you?

Alexandru Dancu, planet Earth, student

Evita Lanka, developer, Liepāja, Latvia

Kane, electronic music producer, Bristol, UK

Paul Nader, Marble developer, Bristol, UK

What is your role in the Space Apps Challenge?

Alex, Evita and Paul developed it. Kane contributed with awesome sounds.

Why did you decide to take part in the Space Apps Challenge?

The overview effect is “a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

We were inspired by the documentary http://vimeo.com/55073825 that reports this phenomenon.

We wanted to take part in this challenge, to show humans the "unity of all life on earth, of consciousness and awareness" (quote from the people working for NASA interviewed in the video). We wanted to achieve this by creating an interactive audio-visual experience that shows that we are all made of star dust, we are all together on this planet, we are all one and we should collaborate in making the world a better, peaceful, sustainable place, even if we need to find another human motivation other than money. We live an exciting time of human civilization we will experience a lot of changes in society in the next years because never before has the population on earth reached this level of world scale education and information exchange.

How did you innovate to improve life in space or on earth during Space Apps? We have hacked an atmospheric scattering and a whole body input open source project. Using a large screen and your own body you can control movement in the outer atmosphere of a Blue Marble accompanied by “space sounds” that enrich the experience.

Initially the plan was to make use of the following open source resources

1. http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-programming-and-theory/real-time-atmospheric-scattering-r2093

2. http://marble.kde.org/

3. http://data.spaceappschallenge.org/Images.zip

combined with

•deep bass space music, such as: https://soundcloud.com/neka

•novel interactive devices, such as 3d hand input http://leapmotion.com/ or whole body input e.g. kinect

but then, considering the time and resources, we decided to integrate Sean O'Neill's source code from gamedev (resource 1) with open source libraries for the Kinect:

http://www.openni.org/openni-sdk/

http://www.openni.org/files/nite/

and the open source audio library

http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/Forms/AllItems.aspx

This was done during 48h (see github commits for details).

The project can be extended by improving the control for atmosphere reentry, but also by having pictures (resource 2) popping up on the Blue Marble depending on their geo-location. Marble (resource 3) could benefit of the integration of our atmospheric scattering source code.

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Project Information

License: GNU General Public License
Source Code/Project URL: https://github.com/alxd/overview

Resources

Atmospheric Scattering source code - http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-programming-and-theory/real-time-atmospheric-scattering-r2093
Virtual Globe, it's an "open source Google Earth" - http://marble.kde.org/
NASA pictures - http://data.spaceappschallenge.org/Images.zip/
Overview effect wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect/
Overview documentary - http://vimeo.com/55073825/
Display of the earth taking into account atmospheric scattering - article describing O'Neils method - http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=166140
Kane's soundcloud page (space music) - https://soundcloud.com/neka