The NASA Mars Perseverance Rover is set to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30, and you’ll be able to watch the liftoff in Oculus Venues.
Facebook announced that the countdown and liftoff stream for the NASA Perseverance Rover will be broadcast in Oculus Venues, which is available for Oculus Quest and Oculus Go. The broadcast will begin at 4:00am PST on July 30, and is scheduled to end approximately 2 hours later at 6:00am. The launch time has been tentatively set right in the middle at 4:50am PT, but being a live event, that’s subject to change.
According to NASA, the Perseverance rover mission “takes the next step by not only seeking signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life itself.” It will take almost 7 months to reach the red planet, touching down on February 18 next year.
Oculus Venues is an app that allows you to watch an event broadcast in VR while sitting in stadium-like seating, surrounded by other Venues users who are watching in sync with you. You can talk and interact with people around you, each of which is represented by their Oculus Avatar. While there is an option to use Venues by yourself, the main purpose of the app is to provide a social setting to watch an event in VR — it’s essentially simulating being in a live audience.
Venues has mostly hosted music concerts in the past, but has reached been branching out into other areas, such as this NASA liftoff stream or our UploadVR Summer Showcase last month.
You can subscribe to the Oculus Venue Perseverance event online or in the Oculus Venues app on your headset.
