Xabier Albizu, SpainMARS M.U.V. (Multi-utility Vehicle)
By Ed Avis
Architecture and engineering projects are typically constrained by existing buildings and geographic features, so it may be hard to imagine designing a million-person city from scratch. But that’s exactly what HP asked of designers in the company’s “HP Mars Home Planet” project.
The project, which attracted almost 500 entries in its first phase, aims to create a virtual community on Mars. HP Mars Home Planet taps the collective skills of thousands of designers around the world to solve the challenges of making Mars hospitable to life.
“The idea for this kind of collaborative design project started with Project Soane [a project to restore a famous bank building in London] in 2015,” says Sean Young, HP’s worldwide segment manager for AEC.
After Project Soane, HP provided NASA with a printer that can be used in the zero-gravity environment on the International Space Station.
“That got us thinking – NASA is going to Mars, which would be an interesting subject for another community-based project,” Young says. “Maybe we can use the design skills of the world community to design this society on Mars. We decided to make it big – let’s create a civilization for a million people.”
The Mars project has three phases spread over a year. The project began in August 2017 and if all goes as planned, will be finished by August 2018. The collaboration aspect of the project is managed by Launch Forth, a virtual project development community that solves design and engineering problems.
The Concept Phase, which just concluded, challenged designers to create concepts for buildings, vehicles, cities and public transportation systems on Mars, taking into consideration all of the environmental constraints. The second phase, the Modeling Phase, will create 3D models of the winning entries from the Concept Phase. And the final phase, Rendering, will create a virtual reality world based on the designs.
“The winners of the Concept Phase were just announced last week,” Young says. “We had asked engineers, architects, and designers to design what you’re good at – follow the process you use in your day job -- but design it for Mars.”
The winners of the Concept Phase included Kadek Wickasana of Indonesia, who envisioned
Kadek Wicaksana, IndonesiaMars Colony 1.0
an underground city; Xabier Albizu from Spain, who designed a vehicle than can drive on the surface or hang from a cable like an elevated train; and Yih Foo Looi from Malaysia, who engineered a system to create breathable air from waste products.
“We were just blown away by the quality of the entries,” Young says. “It was hard to choose the winners.”
Yih Foo Looi, MalaysiaLiving Environments from Hostile Wastes
The designs were judged by a volunteer panel that included architect Daniel Libeskind; Dreamworks Animation Group President Chris deFaria; and Star Wars concept artist Ryan Church; among others.
HP PageWide printers were used to print out the winning submissions and documentation.
The 3D Modeling phase of the project is now underway, and will result in a library of 3D models that can be referenced by the VR designers and others interested in a Mars urban project in the future.
The VR rendering phase will kick off in March. Like the other phases, the work on the VR phase will be crowd-sourced.
“The VR will be managed by Technicolor, which did the special effects for the movie The
Martian,” Young explains. “They’ll define the production plan, but instead of doing the work themselves, they’ll parse out the tasks that can be taken on by co-creators in our community. So all the work will get done by people in the community, and Technicolor will put it all together.”
Once that part of the project is done, hopefully in August, the world will be able to access the VR model and get a first-hand look at what life on Mars might look like.
Interested in joining the project? Visit hp.com/go/mars