Virtual Tour Of The ISS Highlights NASA’s New YouTube Collection Of 3D Videos

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
None of us can take an actual guided tour around the International Space Station (ISS), but a newly-released NASA video offers the next best thing – a virtual look around the facility. NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, serving as tour guide for the journey, traveled about 450 miles around the Earth in the 90 seconds it took him to float around 200 feet from one end to the other.

On the video, which Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing calls “hypnotic,” Weisman starts in the back of the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) at the very rear of the ISS, and as he begins floating forward, he promises to “pass some fun things on the way.”
Along the way he greets cosmonauts Yelena Serova and Maxim Surayev and NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore, then travels through the space station’s Functional Cargo Block (FCB) and over the crew quarters before reaching the front end of the ISS.
As Time.com’s Alexandra Sifferlin pointed out, this isn’t the first video tour of the space station. During Expedition 31 back in 2012, astronaut Don Pettit shot footage of his travels through the ISS using a 3D camera, pointing the cameras outside the station portals to give viewers a look at a docked Russian Soyuz capsule and the station’s many trusses and solar panels.
NASA also posted Pettit’s video on YouTube earlier this week, noting that red-blue stereoscopic 3D vision glasses were required to view the footage in three-dimensions. Unlike Weisman’s tour through the facility, Pettit does not speak throughout his film. Rather, it is a series of different scenes from throughout the space station set to a musical score – but what incredible shots they are!

Over the summer, Weisman, his NASA colleague Steve Swanson, and Alexander Gerst of the ESA conducted an experiment using a 3D camera. In order to analyze the phenomenon of water surface tension in the ISS’s microgravity environment, the trio of crew members “submerged” a sealed GoPro camera into a floating ball of water roughly the same size as a softball, then used another 3D camera to record the results.

Footage from both the submerged camera and external ones are included in a pair of videos posted on YouTube Monday by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and according to Mariella Moon of Engadget, it looks like NASA is planning to release additional 3D videos in the near future, as the cameras used to take them tend to fare better while in space.
“See, the radiation out there affects ordinary cams, burning out hundreds to thousands of pixels – enough for them to need replacing every 8 to 12 months,” she explained in an article Tuesday. “The astronauts noticed, however, that the first $21,000 3D camera brought aboard the station in 2011 remained largely the same through the years.”
In a statement released earlier this week, NASA explained that the 3D videos “will give viewers a more realistic representation of living and working on the International Space Station and other fascinating images from the nation’s space program.” The space agency cited the iconic films of the Apollo and Mercury astronauts floating in orbit and walking on the surface of the moon as inspiration for the growing playlist of videos on its YouTube playlist.
“Delivering images from these new and exciting locations is how we share our accomplishments with the world,” explained Rodney Grubbs, program manager for NASA’s Imagery Experts Program at Marshall. “As the industry made advances in technology, from film to digital cameras and then cameras with better resolutions, we all benefited by seeing sharper and cleaner images from space.”
“Shooting in 3-D hasn’t changed much in 50 or 60 years,” he added. “The camera still has two distinct left and right lenses, but now we record to two separate flash memory cards, one for the left camera eye and one for the right. We don’t have to transmit taped footage and re-record it here. We can simply download an exact copy of those digital files to the ground, merge them in our editing software here, and create the same 3D image they had in orbit.”
While NASA did note that standard two-dimensional versions of both the tour video and the water surface tension video were also available, it did not drop any hints as to when the public might expect the next wave of 3D videos to be released.
“Scientists and engineers also are interested in this investigation of 3-D cameras for possible future use to determine proximity in space and for rendezvous and docking operations,” the agency said. “In the meantime, Grubbs and his team are now planning to send up a camera that could shoot nearly six times the resolution of an HD camera, encouraging the crew to record more video to share with the public.”
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