System: HTC Vive Only
Price at Time Of Review: Free
Comfort Rating: Yellow
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
VR Shop Score 1/100: 70
Description: Done by professional astronomers, this VR experience takes you inside one of their NASA supercomputer simulations to within a few light-years of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole lurking at the centre of our galaxy. Besides the black hole, the simulation shows one of its important feeding sources: stellar winds that are blown into outer space from stars orbiting the black hole. These stellar winds slam into each other, heating the wind material to temperatures that are so hot — tens of millions of degrees — that they glow in X-rays. When viewed from Earth, these same X-rays are detected by telescopes in space, in particular NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The stars and their stellar winds are seen by ground-based telescopes in Chile, among other places, but the only way to get a close-up view is to go there yourself in this app!
Review: If you just so happen to enjoy subject matters like astrophysics or space you should find yourself enjoying ‘Galactic Center VR’ as it is a scientific simulation of the Galactic Center. While there isn’t a huge amount of interactivity here nor a whole lot of educational material it is still kind of interesting in a space-nerd way. You will need a pretty beefy GPU to get this to run smoothly, but it will be well worth the upgrade if you need it. It’s free, weird and if you ask me well worth a look if it is something you have an interest in.
