Virtual Field Trip Interface

About Virtual Field Trip

The Virtual Field Trip is an immersive multimedia application developed to support student and user exploration of areas on Earth that have been identified as analog sites to regions on Mars. Analog sites are those areas that share some common traits with sites on Mars and have been identified based on their significance and importance to NASA.

Within the application, users are taken from a global view directly down to a surface view of a site. They are then seamlessly placed into a 360 degree spherical virtual reality surface panorama of that location. Next users navigate around the site selecting various objects and scientists to learn more about how and why this site was chosen, how it relates to Mars, and why it is of interest. The environment consists of various linked 360 degree spherical stitched virtual reality environments, 3D based layered environments, global fly downs, as well as compressed streaming video files within each area of research.

*Virtual Field Trip was created by NASA in collaboration with the Macquarie University at Sydney, the Australian Centre for Astrobiology and the ICT Innovations Center at Macquarie University.

WTD Interface

About "What's the Difference?"

“What’s the Difference?” (WTD) is a free multimedia software application that facilitates scientific analysis by allowing virtually any pictures, graphics, animations and movies to be compared side by side. The WTD Pilbara dataset (included) contains comparisons between both modern and ancient environments on Earth and Mars. In all, four distinct environments can be opened simultaneously.

WTD is also a robust and flexible in-depth authoring tool that enables users to populate a template with NASA science content or virtually any conceivable data. WTD allows the developer to incorporate graphical, animated, interactive, textual and audio-formatted content, customized multiple choice and summary assessment tests, and to create hypotheses used for presenting inquiry-based questions. The program also includes a comparison of the nine planets and major moons within our solar system.