Astrowurld

In 2023, after the Titan submersible implosion incident, I realised I didn’t know much about oceanography. As a typically curious person, I started reading articles and searching for documentaries on the Earth’s oceans, but I didn’t find enough content that piqued my interest. My effort, however, affected my social media algorithm, and I started seeing more science-oriented content on YouTube and TikTok. One evening, I stumbled on a video of Brian Cox talking about Blackholes. I was intrigued and curious, and that kickstarted my astronomy journey.

After a year of constant astronomy self-learning, I decided to start working on a project to help me learn more and teach people, and Astrowurld was born.

The dream was to build an immersive and interactive playground from the start. To execute this, I needed to use Three.js and 3d assets designed with Blender. I didn’t know how to use Blender, and I hadn’t written a single line of code in over 4 years, so I had a huge chunk of work cut out for me. This created a roadblock that would take months to navigate because I barely had time to focus on this (I had other academic and career commitments of higher priority at the time). I became overwhelmed and just pushed the project aside and continued learning astronomy concepts.

Progress was slow or almost stagnant for a long while until I stumbled on a video from Dalton & Michael at YCombinator. They talked about how you can always start big things small and grow instead of trying to go big from the onset, and that changed my perspective.

I restrategized and created the Astrowurld blog as the first major step to have something out. Working on the blog has helped me become more proactive on the project, and I have learnt a lot more while writing educational content.

I started learning Blender again and explored various open-source libraries for 3d assets I can work with. I found many open-source assets by Mieke Roth to be quite useful.

At the moment, I am more focused on content strategy and creation for the Astrowurld blog while I upskill on Blender and gather as many useful open-source resources I can find to make my work faster.

The goal of this project is to onboard and enlighten as many people as possible to astronomy.

The short term target for the project is for blog to have at least 10 unique articles and for me to get decent at using Blender by the end of Q2 2025.

The full immersive website will go Q4 2025.