Explore IceCube, neutrinos, and the extreme universe like never before! IceCube and its partners have developed a variety of virtual and augmented reality experiences. If you have any questions about them, please contact learn@icecube.wisc.edu.
“Exploring the Universe from Antarctica”
(VR + mobile app)
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the “Exploring the Universe from Antarctica” games were developed by an interdisciplinary team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Field Day Lab based at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery: James Madsen, Silvia Bravo Gallart, Kevin Ponto, Ross Tredinnick, Mel Rush, Andrew Chase, Brady Boettcher, David Gagnon, and Phil Dougherty.
The VR game brings you to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica and takes you on a journey through the extreme universe following the path of a high-energy neutrino.
Required hardware: Oculus Rift + matching PC
Download it from the Oculus Store.
Watch an informational video.
In the touchscreen game, you will set off to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory to help explore the universe, one neutrino at a time! Learn more about how IceCube interprets data from the South Pole laboratory to help locate black holes, blazars, quasars, and many other amazing finds.
Required hardware: Touchscreen Android device
Download it from the Google Play Store.
Visit the project site here.
“Hunt the neutrinos” (VR)
“Hunt the neutrinos” is an IceCube virtual reality game developed at Johannes Guttenberg Universität Mainz. Starting at the IceCube Laboratory, you descend in a virtual journey down into the Antarctic ice, where you try to distinguish the signals from electron and muon neutrinos from among the overwhelming background of atmospheric muons. The game, which takes about three minutes to play, has been shown at the Mainz science fair and several exhibitions.
Funded by the Cluster of Excellence PRISMA+, this project was a joint effort by computer scientists and astroparticle physicists at Uni-Mainz: computer science students Frederik Kirstein and Michael Gödel, computer science professor Elmar Schömer, and IceCube collaborators Elisa Lohfink, Peter Peiffer, and Dr. Sebastian Boeser.
Required hardware: Oculus Rift (including at least one Touch controller + matching PC)
Please contact icecubevrmainz@lists.uni-mainz.de for download link.
ICEcuBEAR (AR)
ICEcuBEAR is an augmented reality application for visualizing IceCube neutrino events as holograms. The user’s surrounding environment is mapped via HoloLens, allowing you to walk around and have a face-to-face experience with IceCube events. Voice and gesture commands can be used to enlarge the detector. New features, like photon traces, are in progress.
Since the HoloLens is portable, the holograms can be taken anywhere in the world and shared!
The project was first created by IceCube collaborator Lu Lu and co-developed by Colin Baus, Vsevolod Yugov, and Thomas Hauth.
Required hardware: Microsoft HoloLens
Find out more here or watch a short video demo.
Code is available on GitHub.