December 9, 2019

Apollo 11 Mission AR Project Sample available now on the Unreal Engine Marketplace

Aerospace

AR

HoloLens

Simulation

MicrosoftMR

Visualization

News

By Brian Sharon
Our recent demo built for the Microsoft HoloLens 2, “Apollo 11 Mission AR” offers a bird’s-eye view of many aspects of the historic Apollo 11 mission, including the launch itself, an accurate model of the Saturn V, a detailed reenactment of the lunar landing, and a look at Neil Armstrong’s monumental first steps on the moon—all reconstructed based on data and footage from the actual mission.

Today we’re excited to be releasing Apollo 11 Mission AR as a project sample on the Unreal Engine Marketplace, so that anyone can see how our special projects team built the interactive experience from the ground up using the latest Unreal Engine features, and gain insight into how Unreal can be used to create similar projects; whether you’re an architect needing to visualize a building in the field, a designer building a next-gen car, an engineer producing real-world safety simulations, or more.
Using Holographic Remoting to bring high-end PC graphics to mixed reality, Unreal Engine enables the HoloLens 2 to display holograms of immense detail, far exceeding what is possible with edge compute and rendering alone. Apollo 11 Mission AR features platform-leading visuals, including 7 million polygons in a physically-based rendering environment with fully dynamic lighting and shadows, multi-layered materials, and volumetric effects–all streamed wirelessly in real-time from networked PCs running Unreal.

Exploring and modifying this sample will help you learn how to:
 
  • Create immersive narrative sequences and triggered events 
  • Implement touch-based input and interactivity 
  • Utilize Holographic Remoting to display content streamed from PC over Wi-Fi

Unreal Engine features production-ready support for HoloLens 2 for all developers, with tools such as streaming and native deployment, emulator support, finger tracking, gesture recognition, meshing, voice input, spatial anchor pinning, and more.

Many thanks to our collaborators on this project, including ILM Chief Creative Officer John Knoll, space historian Andrew Chaikin, and our partners at Microsoft.