🌌 ExoQuest 3D

Winner of the Apple Swift Student Challenge 2026 🏆

Growing up under the heavy light pollution of a bustling city, the infinite cosmos always felt out of reach. Textbooks couldn't capture the dynamic, gravitational dance of the universe. ExoQuest 3D is an educational space exploration RPG designed to demystify complex astrophysics by turning an iPad into a high-fidelity, real-time "magic window" to the stars.

By combining real-world astronomical data with a custom rendering engine, ExoQuest bypasses urban light pollution to reveal the cosmos exactly as it appears above you in real-time.

✨ Key Features

• 🔭 Authentic Astrophysics Simulation

  • Local Sidereal Time (LST) Engine: Translates astronomical coordinates (Right Ascension/Declination) into 3D Cartesian space, aligned with the user's real-world location and orientation using Core Motion.

  • N-Body Physics & Keplerian Mechanics: Accurately simulates the complex gravitational dance of binary and multiple star systems, moving beyond simple Newtonian orbits.

  • Real-World Databases: Integrates the HYG Database (9,000+ stars), placing famous systems like TRAPPIST-1 at their actual coordinates.

• 🎨 Custom Graphics & Metal Shaders

  • Procedural Planet Generation: Utilizes custom noise algorithms (Fractal Brownian Motion, Domain Warping) to generate unique, high-resolution textures for gas giants and terrestrial worlds at runtime.

  • Star Engine: Features volumetric MSL (Metal Shading Language) shaders ported from GLSL to simulate plasma interference, warp-speed transitions, and scientifically accurate star colors based on real B-V Color Index data.

• 🥽 Spatial Computing & AR Interface

  • Sci-Fi HUD: A 3D user interface built with SwiftUI and RealityKit Attachments. Features raycasting support, allowing users to tap moving planets to view procedural lore, habitability scores, and isolated 3D spins.

  • Hybrid Input System: Seamlessly switches between physical sensor-based AR movement (iPad) and touch-based camera rotation (Mac/Simulator).

Demo

swift.student.challenge.project.video.mp4

🛠 Technical Architecture

ExoQuest 3D was heavily optimized to run flawlessly at 60/120 FPS on older hardware (specifically targeted and tested on a 2017 iPad Pro with an A10X Fusion chip).

• RealityKit & Custom Entities: Architected a custom entity system (Entity + HasModel) leveraging Mesh Instancing and memory pooling to render thousands of star entities with near-zero overhead.

• Swift Concurrency: Utilizes Task.detached, Actors, and Sendable structs to offload heavy texture generation and high-performance CSV parsing to background threads, preventing UI hangs.

• Time-Sliced Rendering: A custom "Frame Budget" system throttles entity creation during loading sequences to maintain frame rate stability.

• Metal (MSL): Low-level GPU optimization for volumetric rendering and procedural noise.

📦 Data Sources & Credits

• HYG Database: Used for accurate star mapping, magnitudes, and color indexes.

• Shaders: Warp sequences and volumetric backgrounds inspired by open-source GLSL algorithms (including "Star Nest" by Kali), manually ported and optimized for MSL.

🚀 Requirements

• OS: iPadOS 17.0+ / macOS 14.0+

• Device: iPad 2017 or newer recommended for optimal RealityKit performance.

• Frameworks: SwiftUI, RealityKit, CoreGraphics, CoreMotion, Metal.