Students of NUST Win NASA Space Apps Challenge Islamabad 2017 and get Nominated for Global Award

NASA Space Apps Challenge is an international hackathon that occurs over 48 hours in cities around the world. NASA encourages a global community to share ideas and engage with open data to address real-world problems, on Earth and in space. Participants can work alone or with a team to solve challenges that could help change the world. It’s not just about apps! It rather encourages students and professionals a like to tackle a challenge using robotics, data visualisation, hardware, design and many other specialities! This year NASA Space apps competition was a global event where people from around 70 countries participated.

IGIS, NUST hosted the Islamabad chapter of this event, where participants from various departments of NUST, Bahria, Air and FAST – NUCES, IST and Karachi University were a part of the event.

A team of students from NUST (IGIS) made their way to the top by securing first place in the competition. Team ‘ We are VR ‘ competed in the category of ‘ 1D, 2D, 3D – GO!’ by accepting the challenge of creating tools that visualize Earth Science mission and their data in three dimensions. Team ‘ We are VR’ was led by Fareed-ud-din Masood with its other two members Waleed Amir and Saadoon Hammad.

VR+ is a tool created to develop an interactive VR tour of 3D models downloaded from the NASA data repository. lt includes features of both indoor and outdoor navigation of 3D models available on multiple platforms such as android, desktop and web. It was a commendable team effort which bore fruit and students from National University of Science and Technology ( NUST) made their mark yet another time by winning the global nomination. Adding another feather to the cap the second place was also secured by another team ‘ Spatial Geeks’ from the department of IGIS, NUST.