U.S space agency NASA and the company behind Fortnite, Epic Games, have partnered to build a challenge for developers to help create a Martian metaverse experience.
The NASA will tap Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 to provide a realistic environment for Martian astronauts.
NASA recently posted a challenge to attract developers to help build a Martian metaverse environment to aid in training purposes.
The challenge, which was posted in Herox, a crowdsourcing problem-solving platform, calls for developers to aid the institution in building “Virtual Reality (XR) assets and scenarios for use by NASA in research focused on extravehicular activities on the surface of Mars.”
The virtual experiences that NASA has defined as categories for this task include set up camp, scientific research, maintenance, exploration, and blow our minds, each one with a different purpose to fulfill.
The challenge will reward the winners with a total prize purse of $70,000, shared across twenty individual prizes. This means that each prize for every category will be an average of $6K.
Microsoft announced last year it would integrate Mesh, an app that will replace video with digital avatars for meetings and presentations, directly into the popular Microsoft Teams app.
For its part, Meta just announced the launch of Venues in its flagship metaverse app, Horizon Worlds.
