galaxico

Galaxico takes tomorrow’s tidal wave of computing, the wearable device revolution, into space and beyond. It allows you to turn the incredible experience of space travel to a fully immersive educational experience where you no longer observe space, but learn and interact with it.

The app is designed to provide information on all visible celestial objects to prospective space tourists in an easy to use augmented reality view presented on the latest wearable device technology such as Google Glass or Vuzix M100. In order to achieve the fastest possible solution over a weekend, we based this project on the work done by the Google team on StarDroid (AKA SkyMap). Most of the celestial dynamics and projections were already solved for a person standing at sea level. The view mapping and coordinate system translation needed to be changed to cater for a viewer at 100km above sea level (the expected altitude for space tourism). In addition, Earth was added to the framework as a layer allowing us to present information on which countries and major landmarks are below you. The entire project was updated to use the latest version of Android Studio and then ported to work on the Vuzix M100 glasses.

The app is visioned to be used as a much richer platform to present not only static information about celestial objects, but also to connect live data feeds and present dynamic and social content. It can be extended to provide information on visible weather formations, meteor showers, ISS route and even other space tourist flights in the area. It can also tap the social context by allowing people to take photos and add comments to specific points in space during their trip, allowing others to see those posts from either space or Earth – so others can share their experience and interact in real time. Additional future interaction can be added to allow turning this experience into a series of games such as galactic hide-and-seek, trivia and others.

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