u/universe3d

On a mountain trail leading to Mount Sněžka (Śnieżka) in the Giant Mountains (Karkonosze). January 2025.

The Giant Mountains (Karkonosze, Śnieżka) in Poland. January 2025.

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a 3D viewer for photos from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit mission.

I’ve been interested in the Mars Exploration Rover mission since 2004, when Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars. The mission returned a huge number of images from the Martian surface, and I wanted to create a more efficient and engaging way to browse through them.

The app is called PlanetMars3D: Spirit Mission. It uses the same technology and UI approach as my Album3D app, but is focused specifically on exploring thousands of images from the Spirit rover.

Normally, browsing such a large photo collection can be slow and awkward, especially in a standard folder or gallery view. My goal with this app is to make it easier to move through the images in a 3D environment and get a better sense of the collection as a whole.

In the video, the images are loaded from an SDXC card, so loading is visibly slower than it would be from an SSD, but it should still give a reasonable idea of how the app works.

The Steam store page is open now, although the app has not been released yet. I’m planning to make a demo available soon.

I’d really appreciate any feedback on the app, the video, or the overall presentation.

Photo credit: D. Savransky and J. Bell / JPL / NASA / Cornell / ASU

Any feedback on the app or video appreciated.

The demo includes a few sample albums (photos from the Giant Mountains and Lanzarote). The video shows the Lanzarote set in a cylindrical view.

It’s a limited demo—you can only use the “Test Import” (it adds watermarks), and demo projects aren’t compatible with the full version.

It's going to be called "PlanetMars3D: Spirit Mission". Its store is open on Steam now. It uses the same technology and UI as my Album3D app.

In 2004 I was very interested in Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Therefore, I decided to create an app that displays thousands of photos from this mission. During this mission two rovers landed on Mars: Spirit and Opportunity. The first app will be related to the Spirit rover.

In a regular way it would be hard to view that big amount of photos in an efficient way, but using this Album3D-like app, it is much easier.

In this video images are loaded from an SDXC card, so it's visibly slower than from e.g. SSD drive, but good enough.

Any feedback on the app or video appreciated.