Solar Roulette

Solar roulette poster
Screenshot with Jupiter as our moon
Screenshot with 136199 Eris in the night sky

Inspiration

Our group likes to appreciate the vastness of space, so we wanted other people to be able to as well. The pace of space discovery has increased in recent years, such as with the recent launch of the James Webb Telescope, although the public is not fully aware of the variety of different objects in our solar system. Some group members have also been to RPI's astronomy club and looked at planets through telescopes, so we thought it would be fun to give everyone a little tour of our solar system.

What it does

Solar Roulette allows users to explore a myriad of celestial bodies in our home star system through either direct search or randomly roulette. They can then see information about it as well as visualize how it would look if the moon were replaced by the body in question. We also offer a size comparison with the earth so you can truly appreciate the scale of the cosmos.

How we built it

Solar Roulette was built with THREE.js, The Solar System OpenData API, bootstrap, selenium, and HTML canvas to create a website hosted on Render and with a domain from domain.com. First, we made a prototype in basic HTML and CSS while other team members worked on the 3D render and a web scraper to gather images automatically. Then, we combined all the parts and polished up the interface.

Challenges we ran into

We ran in to many bugs involving rendering glitches as well as performance issues and race conditions when loading. Also, some of the images found by the webscaper were inaccurate, so we had to go through and replace them manually. Finally, there were some browser specific issues with Firefox, as it did not implement a crucial feature, which we were able to resolve via polyfill. We also had issues with relative domain paths when hosting on github pages, so we switched to Render which offered a better experience hosting static sites.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we managed to complete a website within the time limit, despite having little experience with web design.

What we learned

Some of us used bootstrap and HTML canvas for the first time. All of us learned many little things about web development, as well as deploying a live site with a domain.

What's next for Solar Roulette

If we had more time, we would display a map of moons around a planet, as well as a map of the solar system showing each body's location. Furthermore, we could improve the sky rendering with better terrain and atmospheric effects for it to feel more immersive, and add gyroscope and VR support.