 Hello everyone, welcome to tomorrow. While I was at the ISDC conference this year, I met and talked with James Burke from the Mars Society about a really cool virtual reality project he's working on called Mars VR. So check out this interview where we talk about how virtual reality could help future missions to Mars. All right, James, thank you very much for sitting down with us today. First off, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how you got interested in the space industry and how you first got involved with the Mars Society. Well, it's a long story. I'll try to have it be brief. I was six years old and I went to the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC with my mother and she bought me the Omni Space Almanac and it's an amazing book. I still have it and it had all these charts about how soon we're going to go to the Moon in Mars. And I was always disappointed because in the book it said we were going to be in Mars in the 80s and you know Saturn in the 90s and all that stuff. So I growing up I was like hey, what's going on? So when I became an adult I just wanted to help out push that stuff forward. The Mars Society, I've been a founding member of them since 1998. I've been involved with them. I was in Seattle chapter president and then I've been the IT director since 2011. So how is it that you right now you're working on a virtual reality project and I'm assuming it's because you're now an IT. How did that project come about? What is it that you guys are trying to show and accomplish with that? So we really want to make virtual reality a core part of what we do and we have a project called the Mars Desert Research Station now that we've been doing it for about 17 years and we send crews out there. Every two weeks there's a new crew and we train those folks. So it gets kind of old having to train the same, tell people the same thing over and over again. So we thought why don't we do this in virtual reality. We can create a virtual reality environment of the MDRS and we can send that to people before they come out. They could do the training at home but they don't really even need a headset. They can use their computer to do it too and that will just let them hit the ground running when they get to the MDRS. We see virtual reality as a critical tool with the human exploration of Mars. If you imagine when the first astronauts land on Mars they'll take with them rovers and drones and they'll really survey the landing site that they're at and we can send all that information back to Earth and folks can assemble that into a VR environment and allow everyone else on Earth to explore along with them and if we were able to do that you'd be able to comb that landing site and have thousands maybe millions of people look at all the terrain and the rocks and look for things that the astronauts should go check out for real and so we can kind of co-explore the site along with them we call this concept crowd exploring and we really want to be the pioneers of crowd exploring. With this are you guys using traditional hardware or are you guys coming up with your own gear in order to pull this off? So for our phase one Kickstarter which ends in five days we're very close we only need to raise about four thousand dollars as of right now we're going to create a virtual reality environment that works on the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive but also on any computer we're going to use the Unity platform and as long as you have a decent graphics card you'll be able to make use of what we're going to do we're going to use this technique called photogrammetry to really scan the entire area around the MDRS and the facilities inside and out and create a realistic virtual reality environment that people can go into and explore and they can go on EVAs around the square mile around the MDRS as well and so that phase one we're going to use existing hardware that's out there now this high-end hardware and also computers can run that now long term what we really want to do is have this in museums and I was I had the opportunity to go to JPL last September and see what they're doing with public lenses that Microsoft created. Now those are more of a high-end hardware but they were able to do some amazing things with the Curiosity rover data and they do kind of a similar thing where they look around and where the Curiosity rover is every day and decide where they want to drill I had the opportunity to see what they're doing there and when I got back to Seattle I contacted our local museum of flight and said how can I help you guys put something like this in the museum they're very interested in this they actually have about 12 HTC 5 headsets just laying around not doing anything so they're really excited to talk to me about potentially creating an application that can be used as a museum exhibit there and so we really want to do stuff like that long term we also want to be able to build applications that run on any smartphone and on some of the lower end devices that are out there now there's one called the Oculus Go that's just came out this month a $200 headset doesn't require a computer but it's a little bit lower powered than what a traditional VR headset has with its capabilities so for phase one we're probably not going to be able to build an application for the Oculus Go but long term we really want to we want to be able to use this as a public outreach tool so that people can really experience Mars in virtual reality in a really easy way we want there to be a low barrier to entry to that and then even longer term do you guys have any plans of utilizing VR to actually have a controllable teleoperated system with some sort of rover or other robot that would be controlled? Yeah absolutely because once you have a VR environment you can connect that to real world applications and real world hardware so you can imagine if you're on Mars if you're in a base on Mars using virtual reality to control some of the rovers outside the base and see what they see in virtual reality that's possible as well some people ask me what's the latency going to be if I'm exploring Mars back on earth it's a nine-minute delay like how would that work well you probably wouldn't be doing it real time you would have data that had been sent back to you maybe from that day or the previous day and you'd be exploring that and so if it would be real time for you inside the virtual reality environment because you're running it locally but you could also imagine a scenario like I mentioned where there's there's folks astronauts in the base on Mars talking to astronauts outside on EVA through virtual reality and co-exploring the same location along with them so there's a lot of things you can do with VR. Wow so what other sort of plans do you guys have other than the training and putting this in museums is there any sort of other methods or plans that you guys have to especially for outreach yes when we get past phase one and build the MDRS training environment what we're going to work on next is building a Mars a full Mars globe environment so basically you can imagine putting your headset on the full globe of Mars is in front of you all the named features are tagged and all the landing sites are tagged on the globe and you can point at something and you zoom all the way down to the surface and you can walk around in VR on that surface location now from a technical perspective that is possible it's going to take some work but there have been proof of concepts done with the real molar altimeter data from the Mars global surveyor that has 100 coverage around the planet and then overlaying that with orbital data, orbital imagery, the Mars orbital camera, the high-rise camera, the chrysanthemum camera all those all that data is available there's not 100 coverage of the higher resolution ones but we can have at least some type of experience wherever they land there so if we are able to build an application like that we would use that to do a lot of public outreach in museums and schools and it would also be a great research tool because you'd be able to go into the virtual reality environment of Mars where you want to explore and really see what the terrain is like based off of the molar data and the imagery that we already have it's a it's a different way to visualize all this than just looking at it on a flat 2D image. Now are there any sort of obstacles that would prevent you guys from getting data from other organizations like ESA or the Indian Space Research Organization of their Mars data as well? I don't foresee any we've been in some contact with those folks and they're especially east that they're very excited about this project obviously the NASA data is public domain so we won't have any issue using that but yeah we will need to get some agreements in place with the other space agencies to to get the data we need we don't see any problem doing that because you know we're a non-profit organization where this is a public outreach and educational tool and so we really hope that they'll be able to partner up with us and give us what we need. Well there's a couple in general questions that I would like to ask you that we'd like to ask of all of our guests okay and the first one is what is your favorite space mission either past present or future? The Mars Pathfinder was my favorite mission the first rover on Mars it happened while I was in college it had a huge impact on me and on my life right after that the Mars Society was founded and I've been working with them ever since and so yeah that's definitely my still my number one favorite mission wow where do you think uh I mean well I'm gonna skip this one because I feel like the answer is obvious normally I ask you where do you think that we as a species should go next but uh well you know Dr. Zubrin this morning gave a really interesting talk called Moon Direct and how to really establish a sustainable lunar architecture for the moon and if we do that in the next few years because there is public support and political support for that right now if we do that that's going to be a great stepping stone for going to Mars like ultimately we need to get to Mars we need to establish a new branch of human civilization on Mars that's the big destination for us but it's a hard destination and if we can really practice the craft on the moon and be able to pilot out some of the things we're going to do on Mars on the moon which is only three days away then that will be a great next step I think absolutely and then finally uh why space why are you doing this space is an amazing area of effort I think um there's so there's so many things you can do that are interesting to the public that are interesting from a technical perspective and uh an engineering perspective you know I'm an engineer I've been a software engineer my whole career I was with Microsoft for a while and you know building things for space especially the virtual reality stuff is just super exciting to me because we're going to be able to give people the ability to go to the moon to Mars without actually going there and so you know just putting on a VR headset they can be on Mars and explore the real terrain there that's just super exciting to me to be able to come up come up with that possibility so well what do you people find more information about you this VR project and the Mars Society channel so we have a domain marsvr.io um also our main website marssociety.org has a lot of information about this project we're doing the Kickstarter right now we have about five days left one of the rewards for the Kickstarter is this metal medallion that has the Mars Society logo on the front and Mars VR on the back and this is one of the things you can get on the Kickstarter but you can find all that information out on marsvr.io awesome is there anything else that you'd like to add or share with us today no just this has been an amazing conference you know we saw the stuff with the spans happen last night they got saved and Jeff Bezos' talk was amazing I think he's a quite a visionary he committed to pouring money into space technology development and that's just an amazing thing that I feel like there's a lot of things going on in space right now the interest in Mars has never been higher than it is now and I've seen over the last 20 years the changes and the difference so this is a very exciting time and it's just great to be here at ISDC and see everything that's going on here as well awesome well James thank you again very much for joining us today thank you very much I did want to give a quick update to this at the time of filming this interview they only had a few days left of their Kickstarter campaign but I wanted to report they were successfully able to fund their Kickstarter campaign and have gotten the money they needed to move forward with this project so I'm really excited to see where this could lead in the future whether it be a tool just for the Mars Society or whether this could be used for other projects and whether or not others will independently come up with their own VR systems or whether this one will be used so time will tell us see what comes of this but I'm very excited and hopefully we'll be able to have James Burke on again to talk about updates once they've had some more progress with it so thank you very much I hope you enjoyed that and be sure to check out marsvr.io for more information also don't forget to like subscribe share this video with your friends and be sure to tune into our live show every Saturday at 1800 coordinated universal time