ExoAR:
XR for Exoplanetary System Visualization

With thousands of exoplanets now confirmed by space missions such as NASA’s Kepler and TESS, scientific interest and public curiosity about these distant worlds continue to grow. However, current visualization tools for exploring exoplanetary systems often lack sufficient scientific accuracy or interactive features, limiting their educational effectiveness and analytical utility. To help address this gap, we developed ExoAR, an augmented reality tool designed to offer immersive, scientifically sound visualizations of all known exoplanetary systems using data directly sourced from NASA’s Exoplanet Archive. 

By leveraging augmented reality’s strengths, ExoAR enables users to immerse themselves in interactive, dynamic 3D visualizations of these planetary systems with data-driven representations of planets and their host stars. The application also allows users to adjust various visualization scales independently, a capability designed to aid comprehension of comparative astronomical properties such as orbital mechanics, planetary sizes, and stellar classifications. To begin assessing ExoAR’s potential as an educational and analytical tool and inform future iterations, a pilot user study was conducted. Its findings indicate that participants found ExoAR improved user engagement and spatial understanding compared to NASA’s Eyes on Exoplanets application, a non-immersive exoplanetary system visualization tool.

For any questions or inquiries, one can contact Bryson Lawton via www.linkedin.com/in/bryson-lawton.

Research Team:

Bryson Lawton – Primary Researcher & Prototype Developer
Frank Maurer – Research Supervisor
Daniel Zielasko – Research Supervisor

Related Publications:

1. Bryson Lawton, Frank Maurer, and Daniel Zielasko. Navigating Exoplanetary Systems in Augmented Reality: Preliminary Insights on ExoAR. In Advancing Human-Computer Interaction for Space Exploration (SpaceCHI 2025). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 130, pp. 20:1-20:13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.SpaceCHI.2025.20