solAR - Solar System in AR

I love this app! It places the planets and their moons floating in your room, or in space with a beautiful star field background. There are countless view options and settings to adjust your view from a falsely close planetery or solar system, to a realistic, to-scale system with tiny planets and vast distances. The Saturn system is spectacular! I bought the full version. Why two stars? It’s so buggy that I can only use a few of the planet views. It crashes, glitches, freezes - it’s impossible to use. It crashes so hard that it crashes my entire Vision Pro. I need to pull the power and reboot. Here’s to hoping they keep working at it and stomp all the bugs. This app will be worth hours of time.

This is great use of augmented reality, and a very well executed application. The detailed 3-D render of the earth-moon system is quite spectacular to look at. And the overall solar system is entrancing as well (though the Earth render is unfortunately much less detailed in that model). More importantly, the developer took the time to really make the user interface work right. Great multitouch gesture controls, intuitive control of the models and systems. It’s both kid-and-adult friendly.

This is truly such a great usage of AR technology. Using an iPad or an iPhone, you can explore the planets while actually walking around. My 4 year old is obsessed, and her former favorite planet of Jupiter is now replaced by Neptune. While scale is not accurate, the app does a great job to allow us to watch the moons and planets in their (decently accurate) orbital patterns. Worth the download!