Earthlight VR: the Opaque Space spacewalk game built with NASA

Earthlight was built by Opaque Space, a game studio formed as a division of the Australian Opaque Media Group, in collaboration with NASA. It was a 2017 finalist at the Serious Games Showcase & Challenge Australasia. The game is a narrative experience set in 2020 that follows Anastasia "Anna" Wiater, an Australian-American experimental physicist who is one of NASA's most talented astronauts. Players go through moments of astronaut training, daily life aboard the station and an unexpected disaster that threatens the crew.

The developers worked with astronauts and the people who support and train them, and NASA's OpsLab in California helped with VR usability and design. Opaque's chief executive Norman Wang said NASA is among the most seasoned VR developers in the world, with experience stretching back to the 1970s, and that the studio was in part rediscovering lessons the agency had already learned. The aim was an authentic depiction of human spaceflight on consumer hardware. Earthlight VR is therefore both a story and a test of how far commercial headsets can go in simulation.

Right after the 2017 Game Developers Conference the game was deployed on the Active Response Gravity Offload System, known as ARGOS, as an experiment in training astronauts with VR. The developers joined astronaut candidates, strapped into the system and played the game in simulated microgravity. The intent was to see how a game like this might define future astronaut training, and for NASA to observe how it worked in practice. Results of the experiment were not part of the announcement, and none were found for this article.

For readers who want the arcade-style companion, the studio's other title is covered under Earthlight Arcade.

The product page linked for the game on Viveport still loads in November 2026 under the name Earthlight: Spacewalk. Its description says it was created by the Australian Studio of the Year winner Opaque Space in collaboration with NASA and calls it the most realistic depiction of a spacewalk on the International Space Station. The page is a store listing, not a page from the studio, so the game is recorded as unconfirmed. The Australasian showcase address that hosted the 2017 finalist information, simulationcongress.com, no longer loads.