Yannick LeJacq , NBC News contributor 4 hrs.

You are the space invaders, NASA manager Jeff Norris declared last week to a packed audience at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

It was a dramatic ending to a surprise talk scheduled at the last minute into a conference usually packed with the most arcane and theoretical pieces of trade information game developers swap with one another over a week at San Franciscos Moscone Convention Center. Gamers and developers alike may have been confused to see real-world space exploration suddenly creep into a flurry of conversations about virtual worlds, but, as Norris explained during his presentation, NASAs projects have often overlapped with the work of game designers.

To start, theres the hallowed ground of the living room, where viewers first witnessed the legendary Apollo 11 landing, which Norris said was the most watched television broadcast at the time in history.

The living room is a place we'd like to be again, Norris said.

While the aerospace organization may still be working on its giant leap into peoples consoles, NASA has already made its way back to the living room with a series of small steps. Last June, NASA released the Kinect-based game Mars Rover Landing in collaboration with Microsofts Xbox 360 team to give players a chance to control the Curiosity rover during its precipitous landing on the surface of the red planetwhich was, uncharacteristically for video games, not peopled with tons of scary Martians, demons, and gateways to hell for once (Sorry, id.)

Norris acknowledged the Mars Rover Landing game along with a small handful of other interactive initiatives that NASA has attempted in the past. But for the future of space exploration, NASA is thinking bigger than a standalone Kinect game. Indeed, Norris and his colleague Victor Luo, a NASA human interface engineer, said that NASA is now working with game controller developers like Microsoft and Leap Motion to come up with new ways to control robots of all shapes and sizes.

Norris and Luo showed GDC a few early prototypes for this new technology, remotely controlling a massive six-limbed spider-like robot referred to as ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer, we have a weird fetish for acronyms, they joked) with the palm of one of Luos hands as footage was live-streamed to the conference through a Google Hangout.

The two admitted that the current examples were more simulations than video games per se, calling them part game, part not game. But Luo joked that the thought of moving a one-ton robot with my hand was probably every gamer geek space fan boys dream. This quasi-gameplay was the cool stuff, the hardcore gameplay, the stuff that made us NASAand, therefore, the stuff that NASA was hoping would reignite our curiosity for government-funded space exploration.

But Norris and Luo didnt stop there. Instead, they laid out a bold and science fiction-drenched vision for the future of NASA and space exploration more generally.

Originally posted here:

How NASA wants to use video games to make us all ‘Space Invaders’