[chrisco255]

Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour. Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience.

Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter. We're currently in the deepest solar minimum of the space age, so I wonder if they'll discover anything related to the mechanisms that drive them.

[dylan604]

I "hacked" NASA (I used wget/curl to download the publicly available images) to get the specific shots (wavelength/resolution) from SOHO to get an entire 11 day's worth of a single rotation of the sun. We put that sequence into a VR setting. It was strictly for a demo/PoC of an idea we were knocking around. The idea didn't gain any traction with the producers, so it just got shelved. It was fun showing everyone how simple parsing a structured text file, passing that data to another app for downloading, renaming/sorting to proper image sequence format. Start it, (stop/start 2 or 3 times to fix typo bugs), walk away for the weekend to come back on monday to see stuff ready to go.

Many thanks to anyone at NASA/ESA/JAXA/anyone else that makes all of that data available!!

[enriquto]

The data is public and this usage seems to be intended, not sure why you call it "hacking".

[dylan604]

I quoted the word hack deliberately. There have been well known cases of people being brought up on charges for using elite hacking software known as curl and/or wget.

Also, it's what my co-workers called it. These are non-coder types, and can operate a computer just well enough to use the software they are trained to use. I use the Homebrew color scheme in Terminal, so green text on black background. Only hackers use Terminal anyway, so 1 + 1 = ? (you better have said 10)

[Valgrim]

Hacking has two meaning: one is to commit a computer crime, the other is to use technical knowledge to overcome a problem. This website name refers to the latter.

[zapdrive]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

[moritonal]

I think you're talking about Titans of Space[1]. Closest thing to a Total Perspective Vortex I'd ever experienced[2].

1. http://www.titansofspacevr.com/titansofspace.html 2. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex