Here are two excellent examples of space exploration made in spectacular 3D. The first is a short film “Wanderers” which uses some of Carl Sagan’s poetic narration from Cosmos, and imagines human exploration of our Solar system using accurate – as far as possible – simulations of the planets and moons. It’s a very impressive piece of work and shows great imagination of how humans will go to and inhabit those worlds.
The second example is a game I haven’t seen discussed in TSL before. “Elite Dangerous” is a space trading/mining/piracy/bounty-hunting game that orignally came out in minimal wireframe form on the old Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64. It was compeling to play even back then. While I’ve not tried Elite in it’s current form I think it would be interesting to Bill and his fellow gamers for comparison to their platform. As far as I can tell there are no avatars in it, but as this YouTube video explains, there is definitely a strong community aspect.
8 replies on “3D Worlds, 2 Different examples”
Hey Martin! This is Cheryl Twomey. I am sooooo excited that you’re here. Have fun. This is a great site.
I haven’t played Elite yet either but I have played EVE. It does get knocks for being a somewhat harsh player on player type game but the vistas of solar systems and gas clouds are rather remarkable. They do also make an effort at advancing real science and have had a couple projects where players can participate in various tasks.
I love, love, love that “Wanderers” clip! It just joined the first “Interstellar” trailer as one of the most stirring, inspiring shorts about our yearning and need to explore that I have yet seen. Thank you, Martin! I had not seen that before!
agreed Troy. The visuals lived up to the stirring narration by Sagan. His series Cosmos may have ended with a stupid nuclear disarmament diatribe, but the vast majority of it was superb, due to his brilliant delivery and storytelling style. His explanation of 300 B.C. Eratosthenes calculation of the size of the Earth is a prime example.
my first post here. Was kind of painful to make with the clunky interface. Am I able to make the images I added larger within the post, so that people don’t need to click them to see them larger?
Did you try dragging one of the corner handles on the images?
thanks RG – just did that and updated
You’re welcome.