Woz Experiences Mars 2030 VR Demo Powered By NVIDIA VRWorks At GTC 2016

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, April 05, 2016, 04:02 PM EDT

At the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), currently taking place in San Jose, California, NVIDIA showed the first public demo of a virtual reality experience dubbed Mars 2030. Mars 2030 was developed by FUSION in coordination with NASA using scientifically accurate data to create the terrain, lighting models, gravity models, and the habitats in the virtual world. Even the sounds of the rover used to traverse the virtual Mars terrain were recorded and accurately reproduced in the demo.

During the GTC opening keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang introduced Mars 2030 to Apple co-founder -- and big proponent of space travel -- Steve "Woz" Wozniak using a video link powered by Cisco TelePresence. Video of how it all went down is available after the break here...

In addition to satellite imagery and data gathered during exploratory missions, FUSION used NVIDIA VRWorks technologies like multi-res shading and VR SLI to make the Mars 2030 demo possible. When Woz slipped on an HTC Vive to experience the demo first hand, his initial reaction was to say, “Wow! I feel weird -- like I’m actually moving!”. While inside the VR world on Mars, Woz walked the terrain a bit before entering into a rover. As you can see in the video, the imagery is quite impressive. Woz also said, “This is going to be incredible for whoever actually gets to do this!”, just before saying that he felt like he might fall out of his chair.

Mars 2030 is expected to be commercially available in the fall, and as you’d expect considering it was demoed at NVIDIA’s GTC, it is optimized for NVIDIA GeForce and Quadro GPUs.

Tags: Nvidia, Woz, VR, gtc2016, mars 2030

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com