 One. Hi. Hello. Hello, everybody. This is James Burke from the Mars Society. I'm really excited today to be talking to you about Mars VR. We're doing an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign right now. We just started it on Monday morning. And it's a brand new phase of our project that's been going for three years to build a real engineering grade professional virtual reality simulation of Mars. We've at the Mars Society, we have a base called the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, where we go and we practice living and working on Mars. We've been operating that base for about 20 years now. We've had over 250 crews, over 2,000 individual people have gone to the base. One of the things we have to do when they get there is train them. And so what we thought was why don't we make a virtual reality version of the base and we can train them at home and they could get put on a VR headset or get on their PC and learn all about what they're going to do there, learn all about the procedures they're going to have to follow to put on a spacesuit and go through the airlock and keep all the equipment up and running. There's quite a few things that you have to learn to operate the base. And so if they can if they can learn that ahead of time, then they could really hit the ground running when they get there. But this would we realize that this would also be an amazing public outreach tool for our organization to get the word out about Mars, because that's what we're all about the Mars Society. I joined the Mars Society in 1998 when we were founded. And we've been trying to pave the way for humans going to Mars ever since. This project started because I had the opportunity back in 2017 to go on a tour at JPL. JPL is the NASA center that is responsible for all the Mars rovers. They just had a big week this past week. But back in 2017, I got to go on a private tour with a bunch of other folks from the Mars Society. And one of the things they showed us was what they were doing with virtual reality. In the JPL Ops lab, they have a partnership with Microsoft. They use Microsoft HoloLenses, which are a kind of VR headset. It's more like an AR headset because you can still see the room that you're in. You can talk to someone that's standing in front of you and see them, which you do have a projected screen in front of your face that you can see something virtually. And what they were doing was they had all the footage from the Curiosity Mars rover. They were pulling back all the videos. They were processing them into a VR environment in real time. And I could see they had overlaid where the rover was. As soon as I put the headset on, I was transported to Mars. I was standing next to the rover and they had projected onto the virtual reality environment where the rover was yesterday and the day before and then where the rover was going. And they were telling us that the way that they now decide what the rover is going to do is they talk about where they are on Mars with these headsets on and just talk to each other. Instead of pouring over a map to look at which rocks that they should drill for or analyze, instead of looking at some map with a magnifying glass, now they just put on a headset and they walk over to the rock and then they look at it really closely with their own eyes. And it was such an amazing experience and an amazing way for them to do their work. And I took off the headset and I thought to myself, I'm so lucky to get to see this. More people should see this. This should be in every school and every museum. Like this needs to be out as part of what the general public can do is go to Mars and VR. So we have a question. What engine are you using? We are using the Unity platform to build our application. So we chose that deliberately because we wanted it to be as widely available as possible. We wanted it to run on a variety of devices. And we also chose it because it has a large developer base so we'd be able to get help and recruit volunteers and just make it easier on us. And this would be a way for people to participate in like, for example, those rovers are taking a panorama, 3D panoramas, right? The perseverance just landed and people could kind of like walk around the rover, right? Imagine this. Imagine that the first crew lands on Mars, okay, and they send out a rover like, like perseverance or maybe some of the earlier ones that are smaller. They send out a few rovers to analyze the landing site. And all that data gets being back to Earth and they put it into a VR environment just like I was talking about NASA does already with their data. And everyone back home could put on a headset and walk around and decide where the astronauts are going to go explore for real. We call that concept crowd exploring, kind of like crowdsourcing or crowd funding, crowd exploring. And what we'd like to do with Mars VR is take some baby steps towards that goal. And so yeah, you could you could put on our headset and boot up our app. And you could walk around in a Mars like environments. We have our base in Utah. It looks a lot like Mars. We've already scanned a square mile of that terrain. And we have it in the app. And we have our facilities in Utah. There's the main habitat and there's a science dome and a couple other buildings and observatory that Elon Musk donated for us to build back in 2002. And so we we've scanned all that and put that into VR. So part of this project we're doing on Indiegogo right now is to raise the funds to finish that out and release it to the public. And one of the things we'd like to do is if we reach one of our stretch goals is to put in a multi player multi user capability for that app so that you could actually meet up in there with your friends and explore Mars together. So that is definitely one of the things we want to do. So when I when I look at your Mars VR.com, there's a link to the crowdfunding that's maybe you might have some stretch goals like let's let's let's imagine some scenarios like it could be Mars could be a platform where people might go and meet their friends from home, right? They can hang out with their family, hopefully not next Christmas, but for just any time and just interact with their friends on Mars, or potentially they could build their own Mars base and design it the way they want it. Mars, right? Yeah, Minecraft. Yeah. Yeah, no, we'd love to do something like that. I think if we hit our goals on Indiegogo, we're trying to raise $100,000 right now in the next six weeks. If we raise all 100,000, then we will be able to do the multi user scenario. We'll be able to do our first public release. We'll have all the training that we planned out for the MDRS, the Mars Desert Research Station. That'll all be in the app. And then we can start talking about what's next. We want to get it into schools and museums. That's a high priority for us. But we also could do what you're talking about where there are a lot of 3D models of Mars bases out there. There's ones that were designed for a contest that the Mars Society ran about two years ago, the Mars Colony contest. A lot of the entrance, there was over 100 entrance for that very high quality designs for Mars bases. A lot of them created 3D models as part of their proposals. And so we could put those into VR. And just imagine you go into the app, and you have the MDRS, but you can kind of scroll around on your tablet in the app, and look at different other bases. And they'd be full size, you'd be able to walk around in them. We'd like to enable that with our with this platform. And it's not that far away to be able to do that. You could potentially participate on the Mars Desert Research Station remotely. And potentially all the participants of that research station could be kind of like teleported on Mars to the next level a little bit somehow. I mean, even though it looks like Mars, where you have the station. Yeah, that's that's the goal initially is that as soon as you start trying the app out, you're teleported there. You have a virtual version of the base, you can walk around, you can understand how everything works. You could go do some scenarios like driving a rover, looking for samples, exploring some of the terrain that we have. And we want to add more there's some amazing terrain down in Utah. And I've been there. I'm going there again in December for a mission. There's a canyon system there. That's like the Grand Canyon. It's really huge. There's all kinds of interesting geological formations. And you think about like Road Runner, all the desert terrain and Road Runner that cartoon back in the day. It's a lot like that. And so it's a really fun place to be. And with Mars VR, you'll be able to experience that from home. You don't have to go out to Utah and be in the desert, which is sometimes a little scary at night when it's really cold and dry and you're thirsty, you know, even though we're sort of inside a habitat, it's a little bit like high end campaign. It's not like having a hotel room. It's definitely you're out in the wilderness, just like you'd be on Mars. So school has a comment asking about schools. Do you have backing from schools? What's your plan with the Education Society, like the World Wide Schools? Yeah, one of the funding levels we have for the Indiegogo campaign is to sponsor a school or museum. So we're asking for the help of the community to get us into schools. We will have an offering for schools to use this. We will be able to give them the hardware they need and the training they need to be able to offer this to their students. And so that is in our plans for later this year, as long as we raise enough funds with the Kickstarter or the Indiegogo campaign. So is this going to work with any VR headset out there? You can use your phone with a adapter and join this as Android app, iOS app. How is it going to be? So it's going to be tough for us to use it on phones just because of the amount of data we're talking about here. When we captured the terrain, for example, we took about 20,000 photos and we stitched that all together into a high resolution model. So we are going to work on every major VR headset. So things like the HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality headsets, like I have a Samsung Odyssey, HMD Plus. So all the ones that plug into a computer, definitely we can. Those will work today with the version of the app we have now. A lot of people love the Oculus Quest and the Quest 2. That's a headset that is standalone. It's basically a mobile device in and of itself. I actually have one right here. So you don't actually have to connect this to a PC. You could just put this on and start using it. Now getting it into this is going to be a little bit of an engineering challenge for us, but it is something we want to do. It just depends on the amount of funding we get and our ability to do that. But the good news is that because we built it in Unity, there's going to be ways to do that with a little bit of effort. Now getting it into the Oculus Store, that's a whole other Bolo Wax, that's a whole other technical and business challenge. We may have the ability to side load it into the Oculus Quest before it's in the store, but it will be in the Steam Store. We are going to have it as a free download. The base platform will be free. We're going to give that away and then there will be some unlocks, some DLC essentially on top of that, that people can pay for to experience different training scenarios, driving a rover, educational content. There will be some unlocks there that we will use to raise revenue for the project in the future. So I'm checking out your Indiegogo page right now and it's linked right here in the YouTube description. So you can back from $5. You can do beta access for $25. What does a medallion do and what's all the and then you get a book, the latest version of a Robert Zuberin's book with this with the signature? Yep. Yeah, so the medallion, I'm holding it right now if you can see my video. It's just a small reward for our supporters. We offered this as a reward on our last Kickstarter in 2018. It's a really cool little thing. It's it's shiny on the back. It has the Mars Society. Mars Society branding on it. You know, this is our iconic logo that represents 20 years of us trying to get people to Mars and and what Mars would look like if it was terraformed. So just a little background for people who don't know actually, the Mars Society, you are a little bit, it's a little bit thanks to I mean, definitely part of the case for Mars and the Mars Society that Elon Musk got like networking and very early in his SpaceX ideas, right? So yeah, one of the reasons he's doing this. Elon was fresh off of founding PayPal. He founded a company called x.com. That was one of the early e-commerce companies. But it became PayPal. He sold that for, you know, a lot of money. I don't remember how much it was a lot. And he was looking around in the year 2002. He came to our conference and he joined our board at the Mars Society. He was part of us before he started SpaceX. And what he wanted to do then was he wanted to do a private Mars mission. He wanted to send a greenhouse to Mars. And he was going to go build, he was going to build the greenhouse and build the space capsule for it. But then he needed a rocket. And so he went to Russia, like everyone would do they go to Russia to try to buy an ICBM, right? I've done that before everyone does that. Now, I'm joking. He goes to Russia tries to buy an ICBM. They laugh at him. They were very rude to him. He came back and he started SpaceX. And the rest is history. He was part of the Mars Society back before he started SpaceX. We just had him as part of our conference last October. I got to interview him. He's definitely one of our supporters. And we are huge supporters of Elon and everything he's doing with SpaceX. There's one comment from SP 95 asking you did try to launch the Mars VR a little bit before. What's what's the difference now? So it was actually in 2018 not 2016. It was three years ago, we did a Kickstarter, and we raised the money that we use to get the initial terrain model and the initial application. And so we've had that, we have not released that to the public, because there are some things that we need to finish on it that are not ready for the public. But we have showed it at different events at our conference. I showed it at a bunch of different meetups here in Seattle, including an event for middle school girls that was at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. And I took about 200 underprivileged middle school girls through the VR app. So we have done some work since 2018 on this project. But the goal of this Indiegogo funding campaign right now is to take this to the next level. We've essentially built a prototype app or one that demonstrates the feasibility of this. We want it now. And that's yeah, that's that's what I'm talking about. You can see the prototype and the reason why we haven't released it is because a lot of those splotches on the on the models for the facilities. There's some there's some things inside it that we want to redo the training like the the terrain is not the best rendering of that of the data we have. It was stuff that we did with a lot of effort back in 2018, but it wasn't the quality that we wanted. And so it is available for our society chapters to take a look at to use for their events. But we want to do a better version of this for the general public. And if you can maybe fast forward it a little bit. I'm this is a video I showed I'm talking about it. You're demonstrating it in real time, right? Yeah, this is a capture of me demonstrating this in real time with an HTC Vive. So I'm going back up. I'm going up the hill and I'm looking back at the base. The quality is a little low on this video. I don't know if you can bump up the quality on the YouTube settings. Yeah, it's just I think it's because the screen sharing a full desktop screen. If you want, I might try to edit it in later. But no, that's not actually possible. Yeah. So anyway, this is up and running code. This is the Unity app and I'm you can see me teleporting around with the HTC Vive controller. I'm talking about how you teleport you hold down the right button on the controller and point and then let go. That's how you move around. We are going to have ways to walk around as well with a treadmill. One of our reward levels on the Indiegogo campaign is a treadmill. It's from a company called Infinidek. So if you've ever seen the movie Ready Player One where he has a treadmill that he can walk and run on in any direction, it's exactly like that. It's a real piece of hardware you can actually buy today. They're one of our sponsors and partners for this app. And so we are going to make the app work with a treadmill like that. That would be a great thing to have in a museum, for example. And it'll be open source. We will open source portions of the core application so that anyone can help us out with the development and they can also take it. It's got the core part of the platform does have the MIT license. So people could take that when we're done, when we've released it and build their own projects on top of it, you know, build their own maybe like Call of Duty at MDRS or Rover Racing Challenges. You know, there's a lot of things you could do with this. So we are planning to open source it and get it out widely to the community. What would be nice is if this was like a platform, kind of like an open platform and that all these stretch goals, things like people meeting up on Mars and having chat with a friend from Japan on Mars or having part of the next Mars Society convention be on Mars potentially. All these things would be nice if there is this potential that this could be like, I don't know, on AWS or on Google Cloud and something totally scalable. And you could have like unlimited amount of users potentially. Yeah, those are all things that we've been talking about, thinking about the first thing is to get this unity application up and working, have that finished, have it with the latest modern VR libraries and adding the multi-user capability. And from there, I think we could enable a lot of the things you're talking about. We could have a conference just using this, you know, where everyone's in the in the environment, walking around talking to each other, they can see avatars of each other, but they can hear each other almost like a zoom call. And anyone could add their design, their own graphics and stuff and add to it, submit. Yes, we will have a way, even in the next couple months, we're going to have a way for people to submit ideas and 3D models that they've designed that would fit in with this application. So right now we're seeing on the video, this is the room where you put suits on at the MDRS. You can see all the helmets and the backpacks there. And this is the first training we started working on is okay, I'm ready to go out and explore Mars. How do I put my suit on? This is the real terrain, the real training that people get when they're at the MDRS. They'll put on their their boots, they'll put on some things called gaiters that are like ankle socks. They'll put on their radio, they'll clip the radio to their chest and put the earpiece to their ear. And then we usually tape that because you can't touch your ears when you have the helmet on, right? You have gloves on. So you got the earpiece and the radio on, then you put the helmet on and the backpack. And so there's training for doing all that physically in the VR app where you have to actually do those things. I'll link to the higher quality clip if you don't mind. There's going to be a link under this video so people can watch it in full quality later. Because I don't know how good the quality is right now through this live streaming system. It's getting better. It's a little fuzzy. But yeah, that's a good idea. I can I'll send you an actual just this portion of that video that you can share with everyone. What we're seeing right now is the greenhab. So this is essentially a greenhouse we have on campus. It was a little messy when we recorded that. We captured the photogrammetry of the room. So we're going to clean that up. That's another thing we have to do before we release to the public is really clean up all the interiors so that we can add 3D objects to them that that are manipulatable. Because right now you're seeing everything, but you can't pick it up and touch it. We want to enable that we want to enable there's all these different objects that you can pick up and interact with. So there's this the raw images website of the perseverance, curiosity, spirit and opportunity. There's all this data out there that it'd be awesome if it was just boom click import and start going around just walking next to the rover. I mean, I'm sure you could walk 45 kilometers in like a day or something, right? I'm joking a little bit, but that's what that's what the whole point is of sending humans. Like I think the is it the opportunity rover has been there for 14 years and has traveled 45 kilometers in those 14 years, which is awesome. But if you send humans there, they could do that in a couple days or three with it. Humans would explore so much more efficiently than the rovers would they be able to find a rock and pick it up and look at it and analyze it. Whereas the rover is sort of have to like do a lot to capture the images or capture the data and then it gets sent back to Earth. It takes days to do something that a human being could do in a few seconds. I mean, robots will never, ever, ever be able to find a fossil on Earth. So how are they going to be able to find one on Mars? It's going to be even harder, right? With the Perseverance is specifically designed to look for signs of life on just zero crater. So that one has a pretty good chance, but you're right. Like, imagine if you went on vacation, you wanted to go to Paris to take photos, but instead of going yourself, you sent a drone, right? Like that would not be the best experience for you versus going yourself. Like you'd get pictures of Paris back, but you wouldn't know what it would be like to be there, right? It's the same thing on Mars with these robotic robotic missions. They're great. And it's amazing that we get to land on Mars yesterday or last week and we get the images back to see that happen in real time. That was really cool. But I'd love to be on that ship and land myself, you know, that's really what we're trying to do at the Mars Society. And another thing that I would think would be an argument also is that even to find a fossil on Earth is super crazy difficult. But on Mars, we might need to find fossils that are 3.5 billion years old and to find such old fossils on Earth, even that's super hard. So like good luck with a rover that goes a few meters, a couple meters per day and that, you know, of course has great 20 megapixel cameras, which is the same like in my Huawei phone. I mean, it's it's actually half of I'm joking. Now, I'm not complaining at all. I think it's amazing, right? But we definitely need to go there to have a chance to maybe see those fossils that might be 3 billion years old and to understand, oh, my God, there was there was life there before Earth. And that that maybe is just a question of how far you are from the sun and because the planets are moving away a little bit. Is that correct? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if we find evidence of life on Mars, what it means not just that there's life on Mars and Earth, it means that their life could be widespread in the universe, right? That wherever you have the conditions for life, it shows up. That would be a it would be a huge breakthrough, not just for our understanding of Mars, but our understanding of all life in the universe. Now, if we don't find life on Mars, if we if we if the rover searches doesn't find anything and then we go and, you know, 50 years from now, there's absolutely no evidence of life on Mars, that's a discovery too, because it means how precious the Earth is, how precious we are in the universe, because we're likely the only thing out there in our immediate solar system. Because of all the places in the solar system, Mars and maybe the moon Europa and the moon in Celadus and the moon Titan, those are really the only places there could be life. But Mars is the most likely place because it was once a warm and wet planet just like the Earth. It was exactly like the Earth billions of years ago. It had oceans, it had lakes, it had oxygen in the atmosphere. So if life never showed up on Mars, but it did on Earth, like that's significant. So we need to figure that out. And these are quite frankly, these are questions that people have been wondering for thousands of years and we can actually solve them in our lifetime by going and exploring Mars. That's why I find the Mars Society so important and that's why I've spent so much of my life helping out the Mars Society, because this is one of the biggest challenges of our time. And it's an inspiring challenge. And just imagine we go to Mars, we can actually open up a whole branch of human civilization on Mars. We can have cities on Mars and children born on Mars. And I believe that will happen someday. So we are the first Martians. We are the first people that will inhabit that planet. And there's going to be a whole branch of civilization there someday. That's what I believe. One thing I'd really like to see as this Mars VR project take off and be open and so many people participate a little bit like a little kind of like a Minecraft that that all Mars fans can kind of like experience. What would be nice is maybe perhaps if this really works out like that you would be allowed or somebody would be allowed to maybe they just send you the files. Capture, you know, the Boca Chica Starship facility in full 3D VR and then let everybody go and see how they are developing those SN15. They're super heavy. The, you know, what goes on behind the scenes because that would be a great, great experience also. And what I think would be awesome is some kind of way to scroll back and forward in time. So you can choose to go to Mars in 2024, which might be the first Starships or you could go in 2048. If you want, like you can scroll back and forward. You can go back to 2021 and see the SN9 when it blew up. And have all these kind of like options. I love your ideas. These are great ideas. I want to do all that with Mars VR. I want to have the ability for people to create their own content and submit it and plug it into our app. I want to have the ability to look at different locations that are interesting. So you're right, Boca Chica, having a Starship Factory environment where you are learning about what they're doing down there, which is amazing. They're building a whole assembly line of Starships and building one after the other and testing them. And they're failing quickly, which is great for innovation. You want to fail quickly. You want to do something and fail so that you learn from it. And then you try again right away. So I love what they're doing down there. And yeah, it's a great story to tell. It's related to Mars. We actually do have a Starship model in the prototype app. You can actually walk over to the launch pad and look at it on Mars. So that is it's a little Easter egg we have. So yeah, we're definitely interested in doing stuff like you're talking about. So it definitely successfully landed in your Mars VR on Mars. Yeah, well, well, with the MDRS, it is designed to be a simulated version of a landed spacecraft. Like the HAB at the MDRS is basically the Mars Direct plan that Robert Zubrin talked about in his book in the 90s, The Case for Mars, which is one of our reward levels is the 25th anniversary of that book, autographed copy you can get. And so he talked about back then the Mars Direct plan and living off the land on Mars, using the resources of Mars to generate rocket fuel for your your return trip back to Earth using methane for the rocket fuel and generating that from water and the Martian atmosphere, which is mostly carbon dioxide. It's a really simple chemical reaction. You can take the hydrogen off the water and use the sub body reaction with the CO2 and make methane for methane, which is CH4. So the whole idea of the MDRS design is that this is the first landing site on Mars with a single Mars Direct mission and spaceship Starship is very similar to that. Now with Starship, one of the first things that SpaceX is planning to do is land a propellant factory. So they're essentially doing the same thing as Mars Direct. They want to land a Starship or two that don't have crew on them at a specific site to start making propellant, to start making the fuel that they would need to send people back to Earth. That's the first thing they do. And only when that's up and running, do they send a crew out to Mars and live on Mars and then use the propellant to go back home. It's the same exact concept as Mars Direct. So, yeah, a first landing site like the MDRS is very realistic because it is essentially one Starship that's landed and the activities that one crew is doing there. Now, we usually have a crew of six to eight. A Starship could hold a little bit more than that. But it's the same concept. It's an early human base where you have specific facilities designed for activities like science, sample collection, repair, growing plants, observatory. And we have rovers. We have actually these vehicles called Polaris EVs that are electric vehicles that can go off-road. It's kind of like a high-end golf cart, but it's got off-road tires and it's ruggedized. So you can you have two people riding it with our suits on, with our helmets and backpacks on. And we have cargo in the back. It's like almost like a little mini pickup truck, but it's electronic. So you have a battery you charge just like an electric car. And we look at the battery meter and say, OK, great, it's at 100 percent. We can go out on our EVA and we use those to drive to various locations around the facilities. We've got we've used those rovers to go up to like four or five miles away. But then we have to make sure that we have enough juice in the rover to get back. That's a huge concern always. But it's but it's essentially what you would do on Mars. That's the exact way you would explore Mars with an early landing site. You would have vehicles like that. You'd have people going out and looking at the terrain, looking for different things like fossils or sources of water. Like one of the things that an early cruise going to do is have to find water. And and mine the water because they're going to need it for their own water for use for various things. They're going to need it for oxygen because you can split off the hydrogen and the oxygen and water and make oxygen you can breathe. And they're going to need it for the methane for the CH4 because they need the hydrogen from the water to make the methane. So water is a very valuable resource on Mars. And so scouting out where the water is and making use of it is one is going to be one of the main activities of the crew does. And so there's all these challenges that could potentially be there like you you have to first get selected. You have to first you get on the rocket and be healthy all the way, experience the trip there and then you land and you could have as a challenge to like get your rover out of what you call your Jaguar or whatever you want to call it out on Mars and then build greenhouse, start looking for water, start making your fuel to come back. There's all these challenges that could potentially be like gamification, right? In the in there. Yeah, and each of these could take like days to complete and it could be like really interesting. Yeah, the training we want to do is very much like that. And we could have a gamification layer where you're earning badges, you're earning points, you're leveling up in the app. That's all stuff we want to do in the early part of this development phase. So yeah, and it's all about learning how to live and work on Mars. These are real skills that people need to know to be at the MDRS. But also they're going to need to know on Mars. They're going to need to know how to keep all the machinery up and running, how to put their suit on and take it off, how to how to go through the airlock. We were even going to have a training procedure for how to cook from freeze dried food and how to water the plants and pollinate the plants in the green hat. So you're growing your food supply and there's a lot of other things we want to put into the app as well to make it realistic as to the actual operational procedures that you would have on Mars. So this is the trailer you had in 2018. This is our Kickstarter trailer from 2018. This is when we were first starting the project from zero. I was talking about the experience I had with JPL. I have some kind of stock footage of of VR terrain and renderings of a future base. There's Dr. Zuber and our president at the Mars Society. So yeah, this is this is when we were first getting going and talking about the project. And in a little bit, you'll see a walk through of MDRS that we did specifically for this video. But this this is back. This brings me back a lot of memories, even though it was three years ago. It feels like a hundred years ago. There's so much work we've done on this project since then. And we actually have an application up and running now that we can walk people through and talk and show sort of different things. So back then, this is when we were first getting the project going. What I think it could be also like what I'm looking forward to is 2024, let's say, or maybe 26, when when pretty much like spray sex is ready to send humans to Mars, hopefully. If they can get the landing if they can get the landing to work and everything is it would be I mean, it's going to be amazing for people to watch this in 4K on YouTube, because that's something that's been missing from the Apollo mission, like the development and cameras. Even though I would say the cameras they had in 1969 are actually better than smartphone cameras. There's the green hat. Just a second ago, we saw the green hat with plants in it. That's really what it looks like in real life. You have all those plants growing. You're you're walking around pollinating them, fertilizing them, watering them, measuring the temperature of the room. That's all real science that we do to try to grow things like salad greens and cherry tomatoes that the crews can actually eat. And there's the observatory. There's the RAM. The RAM is kind of like an engineering workshop. It's actually the body of a Chinook helicopter, like an army helicopter that we've repurposed. But you go in there and you can repair equipment. And there's the rovers. Those are the Polaris rovers. When is the next mission to the MTRS? We actually have one coming up very soon. Now, this is right here. This is a really prototype environment that someone did. Ours is way more of higher fidelity than this. That was basically a 3D just like that was just basically someone made a bunch of 3D objects into the base. What we did for real is we did photogrammetry. We took photos of the base. We took light our data of the base. We have all the 3D points in space of the physical objects and we overlaid the images onto that. So photogrammetry is much higher quality than what that early rendering looked like there. What was your question? There's a comment here from old school. He wished he put support your project instead of the Star Citizen. What's up with the Star Citizen? Me too. I bought Star Citizen back in the day because I was a huge fan of Chris Roberts and Wing Commander and all of his games. And yeah, I'm very disappointed with that project. It still hasn't shipped. Yeah, that's that's something that's that would be nice to to figure out how to get it like most efficient. Hopefully you have some some are you going to like use outsourcing or how do you going to who you're going to hire with this funds? And there's a lot of there's a lot of talent, like let's say in countries like other countries that might that might be able to get a lot of stuff done for the budget you might collect here. Absolutely. So that's a great question. We want help. We want volunteers to plug into what we're doing. We will have a prime contractor, which is Jeff Reiner's company, Mixed Reality. Now, the good news is they're not just this, we're not going to throw stuff over the wall, throw some money at them. They're a true partner of this. Jeff is an has an aerospace background and has a degree in astrophysics. So he's a real and he's a Mars Society member. He's been involved with us for a couple years. So he's not just this like external contractor we're using his he and his team are all in on helping us with Mars VR. And they're they're one of the reasons why we're doing this into go go right now. We got the reason we had such high quality video is because of Jeff's partners that Greg Walsh helped us do this. So Greg is someone that's done real movie trailers before. So we're very excited to be working with Jeff and his team. But we want to plug in volunteers. We've we've been actually trying to do that for the last two years. It's very hard to do a project just with volunteers when it's virtual reality. We need sustained development from people. We need people to be able to really go deep on this and spend time almost full time on it. And so that's the reason why we're raising funds is so that we can afford to hire developers to work on this for like a chunk of time for you know several people for a couple months essentially. But but it doesn't mean that vault people can't contribute to the project can't contribute. You know go off and build their own portions modules and 3D objects and come up with ideas for us help us with social media help us get the word out. There's lots of ways that a volunteer could plug into this and I'm a volunteer I've never made any money from this project. Everything I've done for this has been as a volunteer of the Mars Society. So we need more people like me to help out with this. Open source this one comment right. Yes I mentioned earlier we will be open sourcing the core platform. So there will be some unlocks where we are having training or having educational content. We're going to make some K through 12 curriculum that goes along with this. We're going to have other other unlocks that people pay for. But the base application will be free as a download on steam and the base project in unity will be a download on GitHub. There is there is so all this content right from I guess if I go in here this is a curiosity. There's a bunch of VR content. So yes there's there's a way to to just put that in your game. Like right now I'm scrolling around and this is the Moss Rover. That's a 360 photo that the Rover took and there's a lot of them like that. And that's yeah that's exactly it'd be really easy for us to offer things like this because this is essentially just an image that you're showing in 360 in the VR experience. And then maybe it would just automatically import and you could like walk around it. Well that's that's more of a challenge though. I mean if you're talking about moving around in this that's not then you're not talking about an image. You're talking about a whole environment a whole set of terrain which we have. We have the Utah terrain we scanned a drone with we flew a drone to take all these images which we then painstakingly stitched together into the terrain that we have. There are ways to do that in an automated fashion and that's what the JPL team does with their data as they they bring it back every day and they process it to turn it into a VR environment. But that takes a lot of horsepower to do. It looks like Mount Rushmore. Yes it's it's very very earthly I see the faces here of the Mars king and queen. All right so yeah so what I was saying before and maybe it's a little bit connected with this is it'd be nice if the Mars VR really connects with the real rovers and the real humans to Mars missions. You know like one of the things I'm looking most forward to is the 4K live streaming of all the landings. It's going to be on YouTube there's going to be hopefully enough of these satellites around Mars to send a good bandwidth. 4K stream constantly for the whole mission 24 7 but not only 4K so they'll probably also be a whole bunch of 360 VR capturing of the first Mars settlers and it's definitely going to be a huge part of it I guess that everybody will be able to kind of like put something on and feel like they're there exactly what we want to have happen we want to help the first crews explore with using VR we want to be able to tell the story of what they're doing with VR that's all part of the plan of what Mars VR stands for with this project. This is a long term project with the Mars Society that we're going to work on for a long time and that's that's the ultimate vision is when there's human beings landing on Mars that we're going right along with them and VR and helping them out. It's definitely like your your it's like your goal your mission statement a little bit at the Mars Society is to just keep making people excited about Mars getting helping with the like networking all the Mars experts and Mars fans from around the world. That's right. That's what you've been doing for 20 years and 20 years coming to work on stepping up stepping up for the next 20 years right is going to be that's going to include real footage. It's going to include. Yeah, I mean the Mars Society that's absolutely what we stand for. We try to bring together the community. We were the first to do analog research. The Mars Desert Research Station and our base in the Arctic the more the flashlight Mars Arctic Research Station. Those were the first two bases ever where people were doing analog research on Earth about how do you live work on Mars. And now there's a whole network of those. There's a NASA base in Hawaii called the high seas base. They also use for lunar analog research. There's a base in China and the Gobi Desert that the Chinese government spent several hundred million dollars to build. There's a there's a base in the United Arab Emirates and Dubai. And there's one there's a couple in Europe. There's one in Poland and so now there's this whole network that we got going with this idea of exploring Mars using an analog facility. But yeah, we're absolutely all about bringing together the community. Our conferences happen every year. The last one was in October. We did it as a virtual conference. We had 10,000 attendees, which is a record for us. We got every person we wanted to speak, including Elon Musk and the NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. And we had every Mars mission at JPL represented from insight to curiosity to perseverance and as well as speakers from around the world, people working on people were working in Israel on on Mars analog research, people working in Russia on food production and the Mars 300 or Mars 500 and serious experiments were represented at our conference. So we're trying to bring the community together. We've been at that for a while and every year this movement picks up a little bit more steam. The biggest thing for us, I think, looking back the last 20 years was the Martian movie because that really showed the general public that this is not some science fiction thing that we actually could go to Mars and live on Mars in the near term in our lifetime. So seeing that movie and seeing the sort of, you know, spectacular story it had and trying to get him back to earth. You know, Andy Weir who wrote the book that that movie was based on. I talked to him and he said I used Mars Direct as my inspiration for that mission design. So it was basically Mars Direct was it was what was used in the Martian. And when we when that movie came out. The interest in our organization skyrocketed and ever since that movie came out in 2016, it's just been different. There's been way more people interested in what we do and we've been able to do a lot of new things. Did you invite Matt Damon? We've tried to reach out to Matt Damon before to have him speak and then do things. Yeah, absolutely. So Matt, if you're watching, come help. He's watching for sure. I know he's a subscriber. I mean, there's somebody called Matt Damon if I don't know if it's him. And there's this this comment that says everybody's going to drop VR chat and migrate to Mars VR. So I would love to see that happen. Awesome to see some some thousand people at the next convention all meet on Mars VR, but not just once a year like during the whole year. Yeah, I mean, right now we use Slack. So yeah, it would be great to just move everyone into Mars VR instead of Slack. I could have that on, you know, kind of a chat for Mars VR on my phone instead of the Slack app. Yeah, that'd be great. I'm thinking this is going to be like the new version of my very early experience of the Internet was 1997 around 96 when I was using MSN chat with my grand-grandfather, grandparents, that I was I was there was these cartoons and you were like feeling you inside the cartoon and it's a lot to do with like making jokes around the cartoons. So if you are in Mars and you're meeting your friends there, you could be making jokes and say, hey, be careful behind you. There's a monster or something, you know, like some kind of like thinking about like and kind of like fun things. No. Yeah, it's funny. I used to work at Microsoft and I actually worked on MSN. Now I wasn't there around that time. It was a little bit later when I was working on the MSN websites in the mid 2000s. But yeah, Microsoft, you know, they've been trying to that was basically early emojis that you're describing. They had ways to show how you're feeling on the chat. Yeah, I would love to have something where we're using Mars VR as a tool to communicate as a tool to get little meetups together and our conference. Yeah, that's all stuff that I think we could do and we could do soon. I mean, it's not hard for us to integrate a couple of the VR chat platforms, you know, and we've been talking to a couple of them already. So that is something we could probably get going later this year if we get a successful IndieGoGo campaign. So hopefully you have two one or two or three extra hires through the funds you get now of a very talented outsourced engineers who like really know how to do some stuff in Unity connect this API with that thing, put the Unity connect with the thing and put the thing where people can import, export all that stuff. Yeah, Jeff and his team are great. They've executed over 100 VR apps for different clients. They have a VR climbing app in the Steam Store. So they know their stuff already. And that's one of the things they helped us early on about a year and a half ago is upgrading the VR libraries to the latest and greatest because that field is innovating so quickly. You know, there's new versions of Steam VR and all the different libraries out all the time every month. So trying to keep up with all that is a challenge in and of itself. And one of the reasons why we need to raise some funds to have people dedicated to work on this. It is possible, potentially one of the achievable what's called a levels could be maybe also do the Android app and let people use any phone. Because that's a cheap way to use VR. No, I know. And I think we need to have some type of story for phones and for tablets, because that's what that's going to bring it to the mass audience, right? Because there is there is a little bit of a barrier to having to needing a VR headset. No, I will say we will have a PC only version. So you you don't necessarily need a VR headset to experience this. There will be a PC version that you will just need a good graphics card and we'll try to make that as accessible as possible. Because the goal for that would be to get into schools. But putting it on a phone is kind of a different animal. So we'll have to have some type of story for that. Maybe it's like a scaled down version of the app. Maybe it's just the multiplayer or the chat functions that you can use on your phone to participate in sort of like it's a companion app to the main app. So we're going to think that through. I mean, it's definitely you guys can figure it out. I think I think it might be maybe the unity. I mean, it's fully supported on the Android. Maybe there's some kind of way you guys can figure that out and just have a scalable architecture that's everywhere because then it's the biggest success of succeeding if if people can easily get access to this and use it on their phone and then they can you can sell these. What do you call it? Cardboard more more society cardboards and just like people can buy 10 pieces for like a decent price and just give them around to all their friends and family and they are everybody's joining. Yeah, you're talking about the cardboard. Google Cardboard phone inside. I think I have one around here somewhere. But yeah. Yeah, essentially. Yeah, that's a good idea. Like we have a Mar society branded Google Cardboard like headset and then you put your phone in. Yeah. Again, it really comes down to the amount of terrain and data we have and all the the data that these models require to render. It's going to it's really going to be hard to do on a phone to have the same experience. Because when you're in this VR app, you can literally walk around and look under tables and look between things. Like it's really 3D. It's not just a flat image like these 360 images you were showing. Like it's literally something you're buying and you're inside this environment. So that's really hard to do on the phone. It's not the same as as a VR headset where you have controllers and you can manipulate things. The controllers are sort of your hands. And in the VR app right now, we have the left hand is a tablet and the right hand is like a pointer for the tablet. So you can actually use a computer within the app to do things like a training checklist, to teleport around to different areas. So that's all functionality that will be hard to reproduce on a phone. What what do you think has been the the impression of all your colleagues at the Mar Society when when this thing was broadcast recently? Yeah, that was a fun day. We I ran our watch party for that when it was happening. We had about 1100 people watching along with me on the NASA feed. And we were chatting about everything as it was happening, as the rover was landing. Was that on Facebook? Yeah, it was on Facebook Live. Yeah. Yeah. And yes. And two days ago when these videos came out again, it's like amazing stuff. This is the coolest video I've ever seen from Mars. It is it's as cool stuff as when we saw the two Falcon Heavy boosters land simultaneously a couple years ago. Like that's the level of cool that this video is. What really gives me chills is right before the rover lands when the the carrier aircraft, the sky crane is is blowing all the dust because of its rocket exhaust. That is that's really when it feels real that like this thing is about to land on Mars and that's all the Mars dust coming up that the rover is disturbing. But even the parachute is amazing. I mean, that they had to slow it down how fast that thing happened. That had two miles of wire. You know, it's literally shot out of a mortar. It goes about 150 meters and less than a second. And then the parachute inflates in point seven seconds. And it inflates perfectly. Like that's really cool stuff. I mean, it's not just the actual landing, but everything about that video is such high quality. You see everything. Yeah, this is what I was talking about. That's just amazing. The dust coming up there. And then when it starts lowering and you see both the sky crane and the rover, wow, that's that is the coolest thing I've ever seen from Mars, for sure. I did see the little bit snarky comment by Robert Zubrin showing that that when NASA pretty much showed that they're able to land the same rover twice because it's it's nearly the same size and weight as the the one that landed eight years ago. But I mean, it's amazing. Yeah, it's a huge engineering challenge to land anything on Mars. It is so hard to do. The Soviets tried many times and never succeeded. But yeah, I mean, I kind of hear what he's saying. It's like, OK, we had another rover land after eight years after the last one. And it's kind of the same rover. Not a ton of like you look at it as there's not a ton of innovation happening there. But there actually is. There's quite a helicopter. Yeah, that's going to be good. Not just the helicopter. There's also an oxygen producing experiment on the on the new rover, the Moxie experiment, where it's actually going to try to make oxygen from the atmosphere of Mars. That's very important for a human mission. Is it going to try to create the fuel to to lift the samples? Or what's the point here? No, it's just it's just it has fuel left in there. No, it's the there. The goal of this rover is just to find the samples and collect them. There's going to be another mission that comes up and grabs the samples from there. It'll have a fetch rover to get the sample collection. Take it back to an ascent vehicle and the ascent vehicle will come back to Earth. And so that's all stuff that hasn't been built. They're pretty much waiting for Elon Musk's astronauts to go and pick them up later. That's what you know, that's what I think is going to happen. I think you just land a starship next to it in a few years and that's going to outrace any submission. We want to see him launch humans to Mars in three years. I mean, this is what should be the top priority right here. I hope Joe Biden hits the table on the hand, a hand on the table and in the White House and talk slowly a little bit like he does and then says, we're going to put all the nasa budget and Elon Musk's starship. Let's go to Mars and before the end of my term before my vice president takes over. You know, it's going to be an interesting couple of years. We'll see what happens. Elon's schedule with the starship, they want to launch a propellant factory in a few years, maybe 2024 or 2026 is what I've heard more recently. But they're going to also go around the moon soon. I mean, that's coming. You know, starship around the moon with with crew. I mean, that's going to be amazing. We haven't done that since the 70s. So it's going to be awesome to to go back and and look at what's left of the Apollo 11 and all the Apollo missions. Somebody should do that, like at least in a rover back there and and bring some 4K footage. And it's going to be awesome just to go on a holiday on the moon because this is going to be something that anybody could have the stomach for hopefully. Yeah. I can't wait to go on a moon vacation. It's a great one week trip, three days there, three days out, and then you spend a day or two on the moon, then you come back, you're gone for a week. Sign me up. That'd be way, way a lot more fun than a Mars three year expedition, although I want to do that, too. Yeah. And that's could be on the Mars VR, too. You could add some moon stuff, right? If this all works out. Just jump in the starship and go to the moon. We'll see. We could. All right. If the community wants us to do that, I think we'll look into it for sure. Cool. So thanks a lot for showing these exclusive footage of the latest status of your Mars VR and I hope you you're able to launch something that gets the attention of everybody like CNN and CNET. Everybody's going to be writing about this right potentially. We're hoping that to get some attention from the news media, we have a press release that's out there. And yeah, we're hoping to do a lot more interviews like this one. But thanks very much for having me on. This was great. I really love talking to you. And yeah, for everyone that wants to check it out, go to Mars VR dot com. You can find the link to the IndieGoGo campaign and pick a reward level and help us out and volunteer for helping out, too. Everybody agrees that the human mission to Mars is one of the most important goals of humanity. I mean, I think maybe maybe hopefully everybody understands that that's watching these videos. So there's I mean, that's what I've been thinking for the last 25 years since I 23 years since I read the case for Mars. It's just an awesome adventure that I hope Europeans that will have a role to play there, too. That you're not going to be doing everything over there in the US. No, we have lots of members from Europe. As a matter of fact, my crew next December is made up of folks from France and Belgium. So I'm the only American on the crew. So. No, I mean, I mean, the whole NASA crew and stuff like that. When they when Elon Musk, like 100 percent of his employees are Americans because it's kind of like regulation and stuff. But we end up going to Mars with a human crew. It will be an international mission. It will absolutely have folks from all over the world on it. Yeah. Cool. OK, that's awesome. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much. Exactly one hour live show here on my YouTube channel. And thanks everybody for watching. Take care. See you on Mars. See you on Mars.