Virtual Space Tourism: A Journey Beyond Our Imagination
Imagine this: you’re an astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) and you step outside of the station for the first time. You gaze upon the blue oceans and serene landscape, 400 kilometers above Earth’s surface. Everything that is and ever was sits below you on a rock floating through the cold, vast, emptiness of space. You begin to realize the insignificance of humanity’s strife and conflicts and become more connected to the only home you’ve ever known. This is known as the overview effect and has been consistently experienced by astronauts. If you’re not an astronaut, though, the chances of experiencing this effect significantly decrease. Fortunately, through advancements in technology, virtual reality space tourism offers unprecedented opportunities for individuals to explore the cosmos in immersive virtual experiences.
Currently, multiple options vary in price and capabilities for people to be virtually transported into space. For $5,000 per experience, SpaceVR offers one of the more expensive immersions with a Ketamine Therapy experience. Based out of San Francisco, SpaceVR wants to recreate the overview effect for their customers and transport them into an immersive experience that provides a sense of emotional release and a deeper sense of calm. Not only will this experience transport their customers, but SpaceVR believes that this experience could also help aid mental health conditions such as depression, PTSD, and chronic pain.
Another more cost-effective option for people to be immersed in space comes from Apollo 11 HD. This is a VR experience that allows you to travel back to 1969 and relive the moments of the Apollo 11 mission from launching out of Earth’s atmosphere to landing on the moon and returning to Earth. This experience is accessible to anyone with access to a Meta Quest, Oculus Rift, or PlayStation VR headset for a price of $9.99. While this experience may be restrained in terms of what you can see and explore in VR, this experience provides an opportunity to learn and be a part of history.
If you are a person who wants more freedom in where you explore, try Google Earth VR. This experience was designed for users to explore the many locations of Earth but also allows users to view Earth from space as they travel around from a Superman-racing-across-the-globe point of view. Unlike the previous options, this experience is free to anybody with access to a VR headset. While Google Earth VR provides users access to anywhere on Earth, this experience may not fully trick the mind as it's a compilation of 2D imaging from satellites and airplanes being computer-rendered into a 3D space.
Space Explorers: The ISS Experience is another option for VR users to explore space. This experience is an Emmy award-winning immersive production produced by TIME Studios filmed entirely on the ISS. This series consists of seven episodes that were captured inside and outside of the ISS in immersive 3D, 360 cinematic virtual reality format. This series provides “a once-in-a-lifetime perspective of our planet”. While this experience is constrained and doesn’t provide a free-roaming capability, it provides the user with the most realistic and breathtaking views of Earth from outer space.
While this is not an extensive list, these experiences provide VR users an opportunity to travel into space and explore the Earth from a new perspective. As virtual reality becomes more accessible, I hope that more people have the opportunity to experience the overview effect and change their perspective. What is next for space tourism? Will users be able to fly around the solar system and learn about the planets and their moons? Or will one of the Artemis missions capture 3D, 360 cinematic footage from the Moon? Whatever the case, advances in virtual reality have allowed humans to go places few have ventured and will continue to push the possibilities in the frontier of space.
