It was interesting to see which booths attracted the biggest crowds at PAX Australia 2015. Of course, Bethesda’s Fallout 4 had legions of fans wearing Vault Boy masks ready to pounce on their presentation. The MSY booth had a throng of followers waiting to see if their names came up on the giant slot-machine of prizes hanging above the crowd. But a smaller booth, towards the back of the hall, around the corner of Wargaming’s towering presence, was also notable for the masses of people lining up around the corner to check it out. This was Opaque Media Group’s Earthlight, an independent virtual reality experience being demoed on SteamVR and HTC Vive.

The allure of the new technology could be partly responsible for the demo’s popularity, but so could the idea behind Earthlight. The experience places players in the suit of an astronaut on the ISS, tasking them with leaving the station’s airlock and climbing around the hull to fix a technical issue. It’s only a five-minute demo, but the marriage between technology and imagery makes it difficult to forget.

The ISS appears just as it does in the photos we’ve all seen, but actually seeing it on the HTC Vive all around you is quite another thing. The resolution is high enough that the ‘screen door’ effect is all but absent, as you take in both your view of the station and the Earth below you. It’s a sterile but beautiful view, recalling films like Gravity. Even with the view on offer, you’ll find yourself closely examining the surface of the ISS as you get that sinking feeling that you should be clinging on for dear life. At this early stage of development, a few physical aspects are missing, such as a sense of inertia as you carry yourself from one rung to the next, but you still feel a sense of danger. It’s also an ideal match for the SteamVR controllers, whose pole-like feel and triggers replicate gripping onto the rungs pretty nicely.

“We thought, ‘What’s one thing that people would really enjoy in virtual reality'” recalls Emre Deniz, who is working on several aspects of the project including textures. “One of those ideas was to make people experience being an astronaut in space on the ISS, and it’s a very natural experience to design in virtual reality  because you’re essentially using your arms to move around this three-dimensional environment.”

The team sees Earthlight as an experience that can convince users that virtual reality has applications that extend beyond gaming.

“We’ve always had our base in health and serious games, we’ve done work with Alzheimer’s Australia Vic as well, to create something like The Forest… We see the natural value of VR in these experiences to teach people in a school setting, for example. The best way to teach kids how to be an astronaut in space, is to be an astronaut in space!”

The project has attracted attention from NASA, who took an interest to the project when it was posted on Reddit.

“We have demoed Earthlight at Houston, at NASA headquarters, so their engineers and their staff have gone through it. They’ve been interested in the project since day one. They actually private messaged me on Reddit – ‘Hey, we’re NASA, we like the project guys, so come talk to us!'”

“We’ve been getting a little bit of feedback from the guys who actually built the stuff up there. As the artist that was responsible for materials and textures, for example in the airlock the UIA panel is something that I made 1:1… and we actually had contact with the guy who built that panel, saying ‘Good job, guys! That’s actually how it is in real life!'”

Working on making this experience with virtual reality has its own challenges, which Emre has been getting support from in the broader VR community.

“As a texture artist, I’m getting a lot of advice from people on the use of certain pipelines that they’ve relied on in the past, like normal maps, hard maps and things like that. Virtual reality does not conform to the same ways that those things are rendered on a normal desktop screen, for example… Your detail has to be second to none.”

Opaque Media Group are aiming for the release to feature an authentic astronaut training simulation, in a sandbox environment, before moving onto a full-length demo on the actual ISS. This experience will ideally be split up into several manageable tasks, allowing users new to the virtual reality experience to play part of it, rest, then come back.

Earthlight is set for a release in 2016 as a full fledged game for multiple platforms.