Apollo 18

Do you and a friend have what it takes to land on the Moon? Reimagine the Apollo missions in as an astronaut or ground control in this 2-player game. Work together to land before the clock runs out!

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Inspiration

Apollo 18 is part-education, part-collaboration, envisioned for classroom or interactive museum exhibition use. The Apollo lunar landings, one of humanity's greatest achievements, took place over 50 years ago and is at risk of fading from collective memory. By reintroducing Apollo to younger generations, we bridge the generational gap and inspire a new appreciation for this pivotal moment in history in hopes of inspiring the next generation of STEM leaders.

What it does

Apollo 18 teaches users about the Apollo missions and lets them re-create a lunar landing. Player 1 is mission control and provides directions to Player 2, the astronaut who must execute the directions to land safely on the moon. The multiplayer feature encourages both players to interact with content together, promoting engagement and developing teamwork and relationship skills.

How we built it

The game engine used was Unity 2022.3.56f1. Multiplayer was enabled using the Photon SDK. The environment was built using freely available 3D assets. Environmental prototyping was done using ShapesXR. Sound and audio was recorded and mixed.

Challenges we ran into

General coding, debugging, cross-platform file sharing and import/exporting. Beating the clock and running out of time to do a thorough debugging playthrough.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Completing everything that we have so far!

What we learned

In creating this simulation, we learned ourselves about the Apollo missions, the mission profile, and what the stages of landing actually were. We also learned about the particular roles that ground controllers are assigned in the mission control room in Houston and what the responsibilities of the astronauts were.

Technical skills built by our developers include: 3D modelling, prototyping with ShapesXR, version control, building for multiplayer.

What's next for Apollo 18

Further refinements, debugging, adding additional features. Apollo 18 may see a use case in the MIT AeroAstro course 16.S684: Aerospace Education in Extended Reality or in 16.00: Introduction to Aerospace Engineering.

Built With

  • metaquest
  • proton
  • shapesxr
  • unity
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