A normal commute for most people involves crawling through traffic or crowding onto buses and subway cars. But for researchers involved in OnSight, a mixed reality tool developed jointly by Microsoft and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the daily grind has an interplanetary dimension.
“My average day is that I go to the office, have my coffee, nip off to Mars for a little while, check out the latest location, write some code, and then I’m back home in time for dinner,” Alex Menzies, the software lead for augmented and virtual reality development at JPL, told me at Smithsonian’s recent The Future Is Here Festival, where he was a presenter.
These casual jaunts over to the red planet are made possible by OnSight software, which processes images taken by the Curiosity rover and makes them viewable through a HoloLens, Microsoft's mixed reality headset. While they are not physically spirited away to Curiosity’s location—and with Mars’s harsh conditions, that’s probably for the best—OnSight does allow specialists to virtually experience the rover’s surroundings.
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