Zoe - Prepare your scene

Overview - Exploring the Solar System

Setting up assets in your scene

Adding Interactivity

Light and Materials

Although this project is for an intermediate level it has been designed to be followed by students that don't have much experience of Unity nor Zoe. The goal is to teach about the solar system and user experience design with Unity and Zoe.

We recommend to create groups of students that will be accessing turn by turn the interface of Unity. 

The project has separate research and implementation phases and is scheduled for multiple sessions.

Zoe_SolarSystemExploration.zip

In this tutorial we are going to reproduce the Solar System, allow the user to navigate in between planets and learn interesting facts about them. 

You are in the middle of space, very close to the sun and to what seems a very small planet. When you look at it an information tells you that you are actually facing Mercury, the smallest planet of the solar system. Then instructions start appearing next to your controllers: you can move in space as if you were flying using your joystick. Then you are given the power to trig Mercury’s revolution around the sun by pointing at it. Finally you can be ported to the next planet by pressing a button. You will see interesting facts while you are travelling in space, notice how fast the planets are actually rotating compared to one another and you will realise that some of the distances are really long! 

Building a Solar System Exploration with Zoe

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The solar system

About exploring the Solar System

Unity Learn: Solar System Experience

This project aims at recreating the solar system at a small scale. While building it you will learn about planets' dimensions, distances between them, revolutions and rotations as well as interesting facts about space.

Keep in mind that for the purpose of the tutorial and in order to have a feasible and still comfortable experience, various aspects had to be adapted. The system has been simplified and scalings are not the same for distances and dimensions.

The experience we are going to build places the user in an artificial set where all planets are aligned and are rotating in place. The goal will be to introduce the planets one by one to the user who is going to travel from one to another, triggering him/herself their revolutions around the sun.

Inside the package of the tutorial you can find the final experience ( _SolarSystemFull), you can double-click on it and play it. This is what the experience looks like:

Overview - Exploring the Solar System

1. The solar system

2. About exploring the Solar System

Complete this tutorial