Exploring the Milky Way in VR

Today I’m announcing two experiences in Horizon Worlds that let you explore our home galaxy, the Milky Way. on the web, mobile phones or in virtual reality.

Ever since the European Space Agency’s Gaia Mission announced Data Release 1 on 14 September 2016, I’ve been experimenting with ways to visualize the data from this incredible mission, and even more so after the Gaia team and other astronomers released parameters for almost 2 billion stars and derived 3D distributions for dust, hot star density, ionized hydrogen gas, star clusters and more.

Although I produced many traditional 2D maps from this data, it seemed clear from the beginning that 3D immersive virtual reality was the best way to view the 3D data from the Gaia mission. It was a wonderful coincidence that the technology to view 3D data developed in parallel with the Gaia mission releases.

In the beginning developing for virtual reality devices was not easy. I learned C# and Unity and released a single user Virtual Starship application.

But what I really wanted was a fleet of starships and the ability for many people to travel together to explore the galaxy, ideally with a technology that worked in some way even for people who did not own VR headsets.

This became possible towards the end of 2024 when Meta widely released a set of tools that made it possible to develop sophisticated experiences in Horizon Worlds, including a TypeScript API and imports of 3D models and textures from applications like Blender and which worked on mobile and the web as well as in VR headsets.

After a few months of development I have two Horizon Worlds experiences for you to try out.

The first is a treasure hunt game that allows you to visit star stations at several stars within 10 parsecs (33 light-years) and search for alien artifacts.

You can try it out here:

https://horizon.meta.com/world/652276037540703

The second is a Galaxy space port without the game that allows you to explore star systems within a much larger distance of 1250 parsecs (4000 light-years).

You can try it out here:

https://horizon.meta.com/world/680600578041582

Meta is providing possible funding to me (for this year only) if enough people spend enough time in these experiences, so if you visit either the game or the Galaxy space port and spend an hour or more exploring them, and even better if you get your friends to do the same, you will be helping to fund me to develop more Milky Way experiences.