Backed with support from NASA, the development of Mars 2030 is underscored by a singular mission: do everything possible to make the player feel like they're actually on Mars. And that, apparently, means starting with a massive, detailed recreation of an actual part of the planet's surface. I'm fascinated with space, and by extension, Mars. I've seen Mars through a telescope. I've shot amateur astrophotos of Mars. I've looked at topographical maps of Mars. I've even gazed upon the real surface of Mars in VR, from a panoramic photo taken by the Curiosity rover and viewed through Gear VR. But it wasn't until Mars 2030 that I felt, however briefly, that I was actually standing on Mars. It's incredibly hard to describe, but anyone interested in space surely knows the feeling; that fleeting moment where for just an instant, you grasp the absurd scale of the cosmos and your minute role within it. If there's a name for the feeling I do not know it, but I do know that I can occasionally invoke it with a video like this, and I also now know that Mars 2030 has the same power. The feeling came when I was standing atop a rocky outcropping not far from the white capsule-shaped habitat that functions as a sort of home base in Mars 2030. As I raised my head to take inventory of the landscape, stretched out before me I saw boulders, valleys, and lowlands which eventually ended hundreds of kilometers away in a massive mountainscape. Above that was the Sun, but unlike I'd ever seen it. At about 40% as bright as the Sun seen from Earth, the Sun on Mars looked smaller and felt more distant. About 20 degrees above the horizon, it was tinted a faint red as its light passed through the thin Martian atmosphere. It was at this moment—staring at the Sun and the realistic way it reflected from the landscape—that the feeling washed over me: this is what the Sun would look like if I was actually standing in this spot on Mars. In that moment I felt further away from the Sun than I ever have here on Earth... and that made me feel like I was actually standing there on the Red Planet. But it didn't last long... it never does; no matter how long I try to cling to that space-induced feeling of awe, it's but a ghost passing through me. Still, the fact that I felt it at all meant that developer FUSION Media had achieved what they'd set out to do with Mars 2030. "We want you to feel like you’re standing on mars," said Justin Sonnekalb, a game designer working on the Mars 2030 project. "We want you to feel like you’re actually there." Making Mars To give players the feeling of being on the planet, the team went to the group that knows Mars best: NASA. The space agency agreed to collaborate on the project, opening an official channel to share technical expertise and "the results of ongoing studies on space transportation systems, concepts of operations, and human health and performance," wrote NASA in the announcement of the project late last year. "While still early in formulation, this partnership makes possible the first virtual reality Mars surface experience using actual operational and hardware concepts that NASA and MIT are studying today." Mars 2030 doesn't just look like Mars, it's a recreation of an actual region of the planet with a player-accessible area of 20 sq km, about the size of Skyrim (2011), Sonnekalb told me. The total visible area, which includes the distant mountains that I saw, stretches much further... more than 700 km of real geometry from one size to the other. To create this plot of Mars, Fusion borrowed measurements of the planet's surface from NASA. The player-accessible space is based on topographical data that's sampled every meter and is accurate to within 30 cm of the actual elevation. The larger visible area is based on data from the Mars Express orbiter, sampled every 50 meters with accuracy down to one meter, Sonnekalb said. With the data in hand, the team set off to create the space, but it takes more than topographical data alone to make a compelling recreation of an actual planet. “Our lead environment artist actually worked with a NASA geologist to find the correct reflectance factors to really get the materials to be as photorealistic as possible," said Sonnekalb. "We use UE4’s physically-based rendering for everything.” The scale and visual fidelity of Mars 2030 is something never done before in VR, says NVIDIA's Zvi Greenstein, GM of GeForce Desktop, who has been working closely with Fusion on the project. "You basically have the real Martian terrain… the real topography with rocks… the lightning model is accurate, the gravity model is accurate… the development team recorded the actual sound from the rover," Greenstein told me. "The rover, the habitat [modules], the labs… whatever you see in this application is based on actual CAD models provided by NASA…" The development team is building Mars 2030 from as much real data as they can, and they are highlighting that attention to detail by designing for the absolute upper-tier of enthusiast graphical hardware: dual NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti GPUs. "We’re pushing 50 million polygons per frame," Greenstein said, though he also mentioned that they plan to scale things down so that the experience can still run on more common VR hardware like the GTX 970. Continue Reading on Page 2... Houston We Have a (Virtual) Problem [caption id="attachment_45918" align="aligncenter" width="680"] Steve Wozniak does a live demo of 'Mars 2030' for the first time during the GTC 2016 keynote. | Photo courtesy NVIDIA (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)[/caption] At GTC 2016 last week, NVIDIA showed off Mars 2030 during the event's opening keynote. On stage in front of several thousand GTC attendees, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang introduced the experience as a detailed recreation of the surface of Mars. To drive his point home, he invited (via video feed) former Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to be the first human to set foot on (virtual) Mars. Donning an HTC Vive and stepping into the rover inside Mars 2030, Wozniak began to maneuver around the Martian landscape. The sequence went on for a few minutes and on more than one occasion, Wozniak said he was feeling dizzy—basically the last thing a VR developer wants to hear during a public demo of their work, let alone one being watched by several thousand people. [caption id="attachment_41727" align="alignright" width="325"] See Also: 7 Ways to Move Users Around in VR Without Making Them Sick[/caption] For the record, I felt little to no nausea during my time in Mars 2030, which surprised me given that it implements a standard twin-stick FPS control scheme, which is known as potentially dizzying to some (myself included). I asked Julian Reyes, Fusion's Lead VR Producer who is spearheading Mars 2030, how he felt about Wozniak's reaction. "At first I don’t even think he was quite familiar with what he was about to get into, because he grabbed the controller backwards," said Reyes. "We wanted to leave it at a state of spontaneity and so he had no idea what he was walking into as soon as he put the headset on… at least on our end, we’re hitting the framerate at 90 FPS. Maybe some of the motion of being able to drive the rover sideways [a feature of the rover prototype] could have made him a little bit dizzy… none of the people who I’ve seen try it get dizzy." "I think that breaks immersion," Reyes told me when I why Mars 2030 doesn't use any tricks like snap turning or blinking to improve comfort in VR for people like Wozniak. Given what Fusion has managed to achieve in Mars 2030, it would be a shame if comfort alone was a limiting factor in how many people get to enjoy it. With many months remaining before launch, Reyes and his team may implement such options yet. More Than a Tourist So what do you actually do in Mars 2030, other than being occasionally overcome with the feeling that you're actually standing on another planet? I got a look at an early mission among several you'll be able to undertake during your time on the Martian surface. Starting at the base, my task was to explore an immense lava tube. It wasn't terribly far from the site, but certainly too far to walk. Luckily there's a rover parked at the base—identical to a prototype that NASA is considering sending to Mars; I hopped inside and began following a waymarker toward the lava tube. The path spiraled out from the base location and took me through surprisingly volatile terrain. [gfycat data_id="GlaringHighlevelBedlingtonterrier" data_autoplay=true data_controls=false] Prior to being on the Red Planet via Mars 2030, I had only ever seen surface photos of Mars taken by robotic rovers. These generally showed the rovers in the middle of a big, flat, rocky desert, and that's all I knew Mars to look like. Yet here, as I drove the rover from base, my perspective of Mars was completely rewritten as I realized for the first time ever just how harsh the planet's terrain could be. "NASA doesn’t necessarily target areas that might be a little more dangerous for the [robotic] rover, but all of [the big formations show] up clear as day on satellite," Sonnekalb said. "Because you have a third of the gravity, mountains don’t settle as much and you get these ridiculously deep canyons and high mountains.” I wound through gulleys and climbed steep inclines as I followed the trail set before me. After a few minutes of driving I emerged from a small valley to see a positively massive crater that stretched out what seemed to be at least a mile in front of me. My path would take me straight down the side of the crater; as I drove I couldn't help but peek out the rover's window to stare in awe at what had formed within the crater: huge, rippling hills showed evidence of Mars' once highly active geologic processes. Knowing that what I was looking at were actual features of the Martian landscape, briefly brought back that feeling of actually being on the planet. As I reached the end of the mission path, I exited the rover standing before a positively massive cavern—a lava tube, to be precise—that seemed wide enough for a plane to fly through. I had absolutely no idea that such features existed on Mars, and even if I had, I would have never guessed they'd be so huge. And yet here I was, peering inside of this massive natural formation—one that NASA may actually send people to explore one day, following the same virtual path that I took to get here. Continue Reading on Page 3... Mission Control What exactly we'll do once inside the lava tube still being worked out, along with other activities that give you something to do in Mars 2030 when it launches on Steam this Fall. "Ultimately [Mars 2030] is more of an education and outreach thing," Justin Sonnekalb told me. "But that having been said we do intend to have a variety of missions in this sort of open-world context… you’ll go and take samples or maybe repair a vehicle… We’ve got six missions scoped out and we’re slowly building them." From what I gather after speaking with Reyes, Mars 2030 will launch initially for free, but there may be more to come. "For the future we’re thinking of putting out mission components where you’re able to extend the replayability of the experience... almost like episodes," Reyes said. These extra missions might be paid DLC, which I'd actually prefer if it means a way to keep Fusion focused on growing this experience. Reyes also told me that a multiplayer component was part of the original plan for Mars 2030, but that feature is currently up in the air. At launch, Mars 2030 will support the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with a gamepad. Reyes says the team would like to include support for motion input, though he refrained from making an outright promise. Disclosure: Road to VR was a media partner of GTC 2016.