With ½ presentations quickly approaching, our team continued to work on developing our three prototypes for Week 5. In particular, we focused on the payload packing and AR moon colony concepts, while putting the mission control concept temporarily on the back burner. For this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at both payload packing and AR moon colony.

Payload Packing 

One of the most interesting features of the Moonshot Museum is the view into the Astrobotic clean room. On some occasions, museum guests will be able to see a lunar lander under construction in the clean room, but, on other occasions, the clean room may be empty. As such, one of our prototypes is focused on giving the guests something to do even if the clean room is currently empty. 

Payload packing was inspired by Astrobotic’s manifest listing the payloads for their landers. Our team wanted to highlight what was being sent up to the Moon and to invite guests to begin thinking about what they’d like to send up to the Moon if given a chance. 

The experience is centered around picking up different payloads using a crane arm and loading  them onto the Peregrine lander. The main mechanic is based on ensuring that the payload weights are well-balanced with no side of the lander heavier than the other. 

AR Moon Colony 

The Moonshot Museum has exhibits relating to the possibility of future settlements on the Moon. Drawing from these exhibits, our team proposed a tabletop experience where guests can build their own moon colonies in cooperation with other guests. While we had originally proposed a more game-like experience, the museum setting ended up influencing us to look at it as more of a sandbox-like experience where guests can drop in and out at any time. 

We also proposed using AR (augmented reality) to further enhance the experience. We believe that AR is a good way to attract interest and allows for us to provide visual feedback on the tabletop. In particular, we are interested in working with the Tilt Five. For more information about our early experience with the Tilt Five, please reference our Week 4 blog post. 

For the experience itself, guests will have a variety of buildings and infrastructure components that they can place onto the Moon. Depending on what is adjacent to the newly placed building, the building will have a different effect on the settlement. Guests will be able to view how their choices impact life on the Moon. 

Review & Looking Ahead

For Week 5, our team was able to work on the payload packing and moon colony experiences. We were able to implement the balance mechanic for payload packing. We were also able to determine what our mechanics for the moon colony would look like and start building the basic infrastructure (like a hex grid) for the experience. 

However, we still have plenty of work ahead of us. We still need to implement some type of feedback to payload packing before we want to attempt any playtesting. With ½ presentations on the horizon, we have to keep an eye on our schedule to make sure that we will have a good presentation. 

In Week 6, we want to be able to playtest the payload packing experience. Thus, we need to implement feedback to the current prototype. We also intend to continue working on the moon colony, building out other necessary systems and creating 3D models. Finally, we need to determine the mechanics of our final experience, mission control.