HP Mars Home Planet challenges engineers, architects, designers, artists, and students to design an urban area for a million people on the red planet.
Is there life on Mars? Imagine a future when one million people call the red planet home. Together with NVIDIA, HTC VIVE and other partners, HP has launched HP Mars Home Planet, an exciting call for global collaboration to solve the challenges of urbanization using virtual reality (VR).
Establishing human civilization on Mars, which happens to be about 225 million km away, will be no small feat. And yet NASA has identified it as our best option to support human life on another planet. Designing the buildings, transportation networks, vehicles, and essential infrastructure requires leaps of imagination and ingenuity.
Get ready for HP Mars Home Planet. The challenge will bring together creative thinkers across professional disciplines and elite educational institutions to simulate what life on Mars could be like. Engineers, architects, designers, artists, and students from around the world are invited to participate, either as individuals or in teams, and can design whatever inspires them, from robots to vehicles to skyscrapers to entire city plans.
HP and NVIDIA teamed up with Technicolor, Autodesk, Unreal Engine, Fusion, Launch Forth and HTC VIVE to launch HP Mars Home Planet at this year’s SIGGRAPH, the world’s largest, most influential conference and exhibitions for computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Three competitive phases: Concept, Model, Render
During the first phase participants focused on sketching buildings, transportation, and infrastructure concepts for Mawrth Vallis—Welsh for Mars Valley—a potential landing site identified by NASA. The concepts have to reflect the conditions on Mars, such as its weaker gravity, lack of oxygen, and exposure to radiation.
The concept phase wraps up in early November, and winners will receive HP ZBooks and HP Z Workstations. High-powered HP Z Workstations propel high- performance, complex work for game-changing, ground-breaking companies like Nike, Tesla, DreamWorks, and NASA—and like designing a sophisticated civilization on Mars.
In the modeling phase, participants will create a 3D model focusing on any aspect of the future built environment on Mars, with the help of Autodesk software.
In the rendering phase, participants will create a still, animated, real-time, or VR rendering depicting their invention for a smart city or region on Mars that supports life for a million humans.
STEM on Mars
Around the world, schools and universities can join in the challenge, too. HP Mars Home Planet Education League teams will participate to support learning in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
To collaborate, participants will use Launch Forth, a crowd-powered SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform for product design and development. Launch Forth’s community members focus on solving problems, designing products, and learning from experts.
Stay tuned to the HTC VIVE blog as we continue to update you on this fascinating project. If you would like to learn more, then head over to the Launch Forth platform to get involved.
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