MarsVR: Mars Desert Research Station VR

The Mars Society, the world's largest nonprofit organization dedicated to the human exploration of Mars, operates the Mars Virtual Reality (MarsVR) program to create engineering-grade virtual reality simulations of future human Mars exploration. The MarsVR team has been working since 2018 on a digital twin of the real-life Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) facility located in southern Utah. As the world’s largest and longest-running analog facility, MDRS has been in operation since 2001, with 235 crews and over 1,500 individual crew members having stayed at the MDRS during the two decades since its establishment.

Using the latest virtual reality technologies and techniques, the MarsVR team is working to design a fully-fidelity simulation of the MDRS campus, including the station’s exterior and interior spaces and key training scenarios that crew members learn to conduct a Mars analog simulation in real life. Our first release on Steam is a special training env...