NASA Playing With Unreal Engine For Virtual World

An anonymous reader writes "Daniel Laughlin, Project Manager for NASA's Learning Technologies Office spoke at the International Space Flight Museum in SecondLife and said that they are using the Unreal 3 Engine to create a synthetic world for training. The mission? The moon by 2020, and Mars by 2035. He said, 'We are combining the efforts of a commercial game developer, two universities and two NASA mission directorates into the project. If we can't check off all three boxes at the end, then we'll have done a poor job.'"

Re:Why UT3?

[TodMinuit]

Unreal is a very good engine. Ogre and all the other open source engines are not. They want something that will get out of their way, so they can spend their valuable time on creating an application, not bringing a 3D engine up to speed.

Second Life is a BAD example of Virtual world.

[argStyopa]

SL is a virtual world, but it's a pretty crappy example of the tech.

This is getting as annoying as my mom constantly referring to herself as 'surfing the blogs' and for pretty much the same reasons.

Note to article writers: referring to Second Life as some sort of euphemism for Virtual World does a huge disservice to the many, many shared-world 3d engines that are out there, as well simply convincing everyone that you don't know anything about it.

Second Life is an absolutely horrific application of virtual world concepts, novel only in the universality of rights it gives its participants. The graphics are atrocious (1990 would like its polygons back, please), performance is sub-abysmal (is it normal that when I see more than 4 people on my screen, my fps drops to 3?), and efficiencies are nonexistent (I recall one of the Linden Labs guy referring to it running on 000's of servers...which, if true, suggests that they're running no more than about 1 server per 10 players online at a time).

To put it bluntly, I was a beta tester of the "Visual OS" ViOS that was never released. I cannot see anything in Second Life in 2006 that is superior to what ViOS was in the 1990s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViOS [wikipedia.org] (and it's successor Croquet looks to do everything SL does, even better).

A brief glance at Wiki's MMOG list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MMORPGs) lists 9 3D-based MMOGs just in the A's that all look substantially better and perform (AFAIK) substantially better than Second Life.

Re:Your mission should you decide to accept it....

[FusionDragon2099]

And you never played DOOM either apparently. The demons are on Phobos.

Re:spacecraft?

[Pfhreak]

The Unreal Engine is merely a proof-of-concept device. It will be used to lay the R&D groundwork for the much more powerful Infinite Improbability Drive.

Re:Sweet..

[sparcnut]

I believe that would be the second "Holy Shit!" assuming all the kills (these 7 and the previous 2) were in the same combo. "Wicked Sick!" is a 30-kill spree.