Webby Awards Honors Mars VR
The Make Mars Home "alternate reality" experience for National Geographic received a Webby Award Honoree in two different categories: VR for Film & Video and Websites for Television.
The Make Mars Home experience invited visitors to feel the excitement inherent in every step of a momentous journey to Mars as if it was currently happening. The International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF), the fictional organization sponsoring the mission, and its six-person crew shared mission details from their distinct perspectives for months to expand upon this theoretical future world. A “live” mission tracker and a robust colonist recruitment program used groundbreaking virtual reality simulations, exclusive original content, and a wealth of imagination to draw visitors into the adventure.
The groundbreaking virtual reality simulations invited visitors to try out for a Martian colonist recruitment drive. Mission-inspired VR training missions transformed site visitors into active mission participants and allowed them to test their abilities in spacecraft piloting, surface rover driving, life support repair, rocket landing, and robotic manipulation.
“The understated technical marvel of this project is that the VR games played directly within your phone’s native Safari or Chrome browser”, noted NeoPangea’s Chancellor of Technology, Shane Hoffa, “not everyone wants to download an app for a TV show, so we made it easy for people to experience Mars.”
Filled with forward-looking adventurers, the NeoPangea team is already training for the rigors of space travel in hopes of launching the first interplanetary digital agency. We look forward to serving you from Mars.
Learn more about how we got to Mars.
