Goddard Engineering and Technology Directorate

AR/VR R&D Lab – Mixed Reality Exploration Toolkit (MRET)

Virtual reality technologies developed under Goddard and NASA research and development programs make designing spacecraft, instruments and repair missions easier, allowing engineers to experience the space before they start to build it. Credit NASA / Chris Gunn
Virtual reality technologies developed under Goddard and NASA research and development programs make designing spacecraft, instruments and repair missions easier, allowing engineers to experience the space before they start to build it. Credit NASA / Chris Gunn

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has been partnering under agreements initiated in 2018 with the University of Maryland College Park, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), and the University of North Texas (UNT) to collaborate on the development of Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) technologies. Collaborating with universities to enhance MRET, with beneficial yet deliberately non-critical path features, allows NASA to leverage the expertise of academia for the use of our customers here at Goddard for a multitude of scientific/engineering applications and/or spin-offs of AV/VR technologies.  Engineering will benefit by enabling new processes and efficiency in hardware integration and testing and reducing training time and mistakes by providing an augmented “show-and-tell” in how to do procedures. Science will benefit by allowing scientists to interact with scientific data in new and more intuitive ways.

For more information read MRET, Using Extended Reality to Chase the Wind in SPARK Magazine.