Sitting in the windowed dome of the International Space Station, looking at the curved horizon of the Earth and then down at the impossible carpet of the moving planet, makes me feel like I’m in space. But they are not. I’m watching the 360-degree VR documentary, Space Explorers, on Oculus Quest. Transmitting my child’s headset is just as fascinating.
VR is not a perfect simulation of being in space. Not far away. But it is also a much more valuable tool than one might think.
Space Explorers is a multipart documentary made by Felix & Paul Studios, directed by Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël. The VR production company has already made VR documentaries with Cirque du Soleil, President Barack Obama and created the award-winning Traveling while black. Their collaboration with NASA has been ongoing, starting with training programs and continuing with a documentary filmed in VR on the ISS.
Felix and Paul plan to take VR off the ISS on a spacewalk this summer using a specially modified camera. And after that, all the footage will be used to create a captivating experience in a tourist exhibition that will allow visitors to explore a 3D recreation of the ISS and see 360-degree 3D videos projected around them. A TV documentary that uses the same film is also in the works.
But in many ways, the ISS VR experience is just the beginning of a greater relationship between space and VR. VR could eventually be used to document even more distant missions: the moon or Mars. Or be used for telepresence. Or to help astronauts feel more at home while in space.
NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, featured in the documentary, spoke to me over Zoom about how it was on the ISS and how it felt to shoot in VR. Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphael also shared thoughts on the direction of things.
Jessica Meir on the ISS with a 360-degree camera.
Kindness from NASA
Another room in a sea of rooms
“We’re kind of used to it as astronauts: we’re always under a microscope and we have other cameras on the space station during our work day, almost always recording what we’re doing up there,” Meir said of being filmed in VR in space. “It really gives us a way to share our experiences, which are so hard to put into words for other people who haven’t had the experience itself.”
The 8K VR cameras used by Felix and Paul for the ISS Experience are modified by the Federal Communications Commission and Z-Cam V1 Pro certified versions, ensuring thermal and electromagnetic properties that would respect the space and that the lenses would not be destroyed. The production has two VR cameras on the ISS and uses one for filming at all times.
Meir felt that being in the documentary wasn’t so weird, especially since the ISS is already full of cameras, but the possibilities for VR as a documentary memory are unique: “Other astronauts in our office, when they now see the ISS experience, it seems that we immediately returned to the space station. The first time I put it on, I felt like I was right there, kind of like I was in a place you’ve lived before. You acknowledge everything and you are transported there. It’s incredible. “
The VR camera on the ISS was quite large and was used to record continuously in certain parts of the space station.
“I was there for 205 days, and because I got to the space station, it was pretty much chronicled in the ISS Experience,” says Meir. The lower resolution footage was seen by Felix and Paul streaming to get a picture of what was shot, but the full files were brought to Earth between missions.
There are a lot of things on the ISS.
Kindness from NASA
“We would just be there talking to the camera and have some suggested materials to talk about, but we could talk about anything we really wanted,” says Meir. “For her, it will also work as a memory of space even if not all the footage is originally used for the VR documentary. ”It’s very nice now that we have these narratives, even if most of the content won’t get into the actual production. It’s a wealth of our own type of journaling to the camera. “
The images could be very well used to improve training for future missions. “I think almost every astronaut who has had experience so far, observing it, noticed that instantly, saying that it would be such a powerful tool for training – because we can’t really reproduce and train for all aspects. space flights. Without having microgravity, without having that truly three-dimensional volumetric space “, says Meir.
“There are things everywhere on the real space station,” she continues. “There are cables that come out from all points of view and it’s so different from what our training unit looks like. Having that sense of realism in terms of the ability to look around you and behind you, I think there are so many things that this could offer in terms of training astronauts. “
Next: VR spacewalk
The VR documentary has been collecting images for more than two years, recording over 200 hours of Expeditions 58-62 and SpaceX Crew 1 aboard the ISS.
A modified version of the camera will work outside the space station for what should be a five-day shoot later this year, when the camera will be mounted on the ISS canadarm2 robot arm. “This will be the first time the Earth will be filmed in an ultra-high definition video in a full 360 environment, without any obstacles,” says Lajeunesse. “And that will culminate in a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk that we’ll film with two astronauts from the moment they leave the station to the time they return inside.”
Felix and Paul Studios
VR can’t capture the strangeness of zero gravity
Despite the benefits of VR as a tool for documentation and training, there is one thing it cannot simulate: what makes the weight of the brain. Despite the fact that I played several “zero g” VR games and experiences, I still feel the gravity outside the headphones. Despite training equipment on Earth to simulate weightlessness and VR simulations, “It’s impossible for us to put into words how we feel all the time without weight,” says Meir about his time on the ISS.
“It takes your brain a long time. I mean, I can tell you, if you eat some soup with a spoon, it’s very difficult for your brain and your hand to be trained to realize that I can only hold this spoon upside down in space. And then it won’t fall.
“We say that when we get to space, we’re like newborns and we have to figure out how to drink and how to eat and how to go to the bathroom,” says Meir. “You can’t just put something down, you always have to remember to take it with Velcro. People in the beginning often lose things or things float. There are so many different surfaces where you could leave things, combined with the fact that every square inch is covered with things. “
Eating in space will never cease to amaze me.
Felix and Paul Studios
I am amazed at the calm, almost ballet-like way in which ISS astronauts can throw food at each other when they eat. Meir certainly says it’s not as hard as it sounds: “Well, I can tell you that skills are acquired. You have to train your brain because if you think about it, every time you throw something here [on Earth], like when you throw a baseball, you adapt to gravity. “Meir describes the movement in space as more like subtle, direct thrusts. And sometimes, when you get where you are going, spatial relationships can change, creating a different feeling of where the ‘ground’ and the ‘ceiling’ are.
“On Earth, our brains use this directionality all the time for navigation and spatial awareness,” says Meir. “I think my brain was remapped to use different clues for navigation.”
VR as a possible future of space telepresence
My experience of visiting the ISS through a VR documentary made me wonder if this type of experience could ever happen in real time and if it could allow astronauts to be there through telepresence. “NASA has thought about this a lot in the past, especially when it comes to telemedicine,” says Meir. “We have a lot of experiments that use ultrasound, for example. I was involved in one of those where I had a team of doctors and scientists who were all over the planet and they guided me, they had the reality of the temporal image of my ultrasound as I tuned it and it could help me way to get the probe they needed. With virtual reality, it could have an even bigger presence, and maybe it could make it even easier. “
A weightless hug on the ISS.
Felix and Paul Studios
VR as a psychological tool
One idea Meir suggests makes me reconsider the role of VR: As I watch astronauts in space at home on headphones, astronauts can use VR to feel at home. “I think virtual reality will be really valuable in the future and for psychological support,” says Meir. “There have been several experiments here at NASA that have evaluated this in terms of long-term missions. There was VR content where you could go on a trip or in nature or choose the environment you go to. And, in fact, they recorded my mother’s voice, and as I walked around the environment, I had messages that I could find from my mother. Something in this immersive 3D virtual reality could be even stronger if we talk about going all the way to Mars and having a three-year mission, something like that could be a really powerful tool for psychological support for astronauts. “
Where VR goes next
Felix & Paul Studios began this multi-year project by filming VR on the ISS, but later goals are beyond Earth. “The next step is the return of humanity to the moon,” says Lajeunesse. “We want to take advantage of the immersive power of augmented reality and virtual reality and immersive environments as a whole, to take hundreds of millions of people to the moon with the astronauts at the forefront of the mission. And then we want to go to Mars. “