Mission to Mars AR: XR Education

In high school, I took an astronomy class.

The teacher led us outside where the class tried to understand the scope of the Solar System by walking around the small town where I grew up.

We spent the 90-minute class walking around on that hot sunny day measuring the distance from one planet to the next with our footsteps.

It did give us the perspective of how considerable the distance between objects is in space, and I liked not sitting in the classroom under fluorescent lights.

But, imagine if we could have used XR to travel around the Solar System at home.

You can read that Mars is on average 142 million miles from the Sun, but it’s difficult to truly understand that kind of distance.

Our brains struggle with numbers that large.

Giving students the ability to visualize abstract and complicated ideas would allow learning to become much more efficient.

With this in mind, I reviewed an AR app created by the Smithsonian Channel.

It’s called Mission to Mars AR.

A lesson in your pocket

This was created as a companion app to the documentary “Making Tracks on Mars” which shows all of the robots we’ve sent to the Red Planet.

It uses text, videos, quizzes, and augmented reality to teach people the history of Mars and about the missions to send a fleet of robots to gather data.

Humans have been looking at Mars since 3000 BCE when the Mesopotamians began tracking it and recording the planet’s movements.

Galileo watched it with his telescope in 1609 CE and ever since then, researchers have been trying to understand our cosmic neighbor.

Without much data, people would develop science fiction stories about a thriving civilization on Mars.

One famous example was the radio broadcast adaptation of H.G. Wells’s the “War of the Worlds” which caused mass panic due to the believability.

This sets up the context of these Mars missions.

Humans have known that Mars was there, but could only watch its movements and stare at it through telescopes.

Enter augmented reality

Online education of all kinds relies on text, videos, and multiple-choice quizzes.

Boring!

This app dives into augmented reality by showing you Mars in your living room.

Using your phone, you can walk around the planet, see stats about its size compared to Earth, the atmosphere, and temperature, and even gives you a split view of Mars’s core.

A view that Galileo could have only dreamed of.

After that, you can open a portal to view the surface of Mars.

Once you place a glowing doorway on the floor, you are prompted to walk through to meet one of the rovers that have explored Mars.

Looking around the hostile surface of this barren planet, you watch the rover explore and then get a glimpse of the future by seeing a planned base camp.

A laboratory, a habitat, a field station, and a greenhouse all on a planet that humans have always known about but could never visit.

This is my favorite part of the app.

You could watch a documentary on Mars or a good Youtube video.

But to be able to stand in the red dirt of Mars and see how far humans have come and will go in the future.

Only an XR experience can give you this sense of presence.

One day, very soon, humans will walk on this planet.

Humanity’s second home.

Mission to Mars

Once you have the history of Mars and a glimpse of a potential future.

You’ll meet the robots and send them to Mars yourself.

The next few AR experiences are interactive.

You launch the rocket from your floor through your ceiling.

I do have one small issue here because the rocket doesn’t know where your ceiling is, the rocket just keeps getting smaller.

It would have been nice to have the rocket blast through your ceiling and into an animated sky above, but this is an education app and we can’t have too much fun.

Then you have to land the rover on the surface of the planet which is rather challenging.

With a touch of shame, I admit that it took me a few tries to make the landing.

If you fail, then the rover explodes on impact.

I really enjoyed that the app shows you how difficult space exploration is.

NASA’s Perseverance rover mission cost around 2.7 billion dollars.

An expensive mistake.

The landing is actually called 7 Minutes of Terror by the NASA team.

Of course, the software is handling the landing not a human with a joystick.

Interactivity is a great feature of XR education.

Seeing that animated rover explode made me realize how much of an achievement these Mars missions really are.

I never would have grasped that if I just read a textbook or watched a documentary.

The Future of Education

Using this app made me think of walking around an imaginary Solar System in my astronomy class all those years ago.

Imagine how much more effective those lessons would have been if we could sit through the class demonstration and then go home and explore the Solar System further with a smartphone.

We would be able to visualize each planet and see the vast distances and extreme conditions of space.

Even students that don’t have a class to go to could study new subjects in immersive ways.

A history class that transports you through time.

An English class where you could watch professional actors perform the books.

A chemistry class where you could combine digital chemicals.

An onboarding training program that is repeatable, so an employee could learn at their own pace.

And, once an app is created, it can be distributed at no additional cost.

Education will not only become more effective, but cheaper as well.

Mission to Mars AR is an excellent demonstration of how all types of learning will begin to spread around the world.

No longer will people have to be walled off from new knowledge based on time-consuming and costly schools and universities.

The only barrier to world-class education will be an internet connection.

Thank you for reading about the Mission to Mars AR app and my thoughts on the future of XR education.

If you’d like to try this app for yourself click here: (not affiliate links)

Google Play Store

Apple App Store 

Until next time,

Sean