And none of us will travel so far as another galaxy, or far enough away in space (and therefore far enough back in time) to witness the early universe, or even the Big Bang itself.

This week (October 12, 2021), researchers at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne released a beta version of their Virtual Reality Universe Project, which they call VIRUP.

You can view this free map of the universe with virtual reality gear or 3D glasses, on planetarium-like dome screens, or on your regular computer or television screen for a standard view.

The computer algorithms used to create the Virtual Reality Universe Project pull in terabytes of data – a terabyte is about a trillion bytes of data – gathered from telescopes worldwide.

The novelty of this project was putting all the data set available into one framework, when you can see the universe at different scales – nearby us, around the Earth, around the solar system, at the Milky Way level, to see through the universe and time up to the beginning – what we call the Big Bang.

The researchers hope their Virtual Reality Universe Project is helpful to anyone wishing to see the universe in a different light.

Bottom line: Researchers have amassed terabytes of data from a slew of telescopes to create the Virtual Reality Universe Project, a map of our cosmos