Examine The International Space Station In ABC’s Tie-In Augmented Reality App

Attentive VRFocus readers will have noticed that there’s been an awful lot of immersive technology stories emanating out of Australia over the last few weeks. The second such flurry of stories from the land down under we’ve seen this year. In April Unity announced their augmented reality (AR) ‘Center of Excellence’ for Australia. Earlier this month a new surreal virtual reality (VR) exhibit Terminus was announced for the National Gallery Australia. And even last week we had news of new work being undertaken into AR and smart glasses at the CSIRO Lab in Canberra.

As to why that is, it all seems to be something of a coincidence. As we’ve noted before, there seems to be something of a ‘London Buses syndrome’, sometimes when it comes to these sorts of things.

Today’s Australian news comes from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) – not to be confused with ABC News –  which has released a brand-new app, which covers a favourite topic of ours here at VRFocus –  ABC AR – Space Discovery.  The new app serves to partly tie-in with activities on the station’s Back to Earth series and which will be focusing on the International Space Station (ISS) on the evening of Thursday, May 24th. Through ABC AR – Space Discovery viewers and non-viewers will be able to discover more about the ISS in the comfort of their own home, showcasing what parts of the station are being discussed at the time during the broadcast and also giving you the opportunity to have some fun as well.

There’s three activities to engage in, including a little mini-game to get competitive over with your family:

EXPLORE JUPITER: Discover the many wonders of Jupiter with an interactive 3D model you can miraculously squeeze in your living room.

ASSEMBLE THE ISS: Become an astronaut and fly parts of the International Space Station together piece-by-piece – while learning about their functions.

SPACE DEBRIS: Defend the ISS from flying space debris – WITH LASERS! A futuristic (if somewhat unlikely) look at one of the ways we could clean up space junk in the future.

The app, ABC’s first utilising AR, is available both on iTunes and the Google Play store (click the related link for each version) and developed in ARKit and ARCore respectively. You can see a preview video of some footage below.

VRFocus will bring you more news from the world of AR very soon, but in the meantime you can find out the most recently stories by clicking “Augmented Reality” under “More” on the site’s navigation bar.