It all started when I got an NSF grant back in 2010 and produced the award-winning app, Powers of Minus Ten (as seen in the original iPad 2 commercial "Alive" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYmXvOeoNk0). The idea actually came from the planetarium community, who wanted a way to explore real scientific datasets on the dome. Since at the time I was producing 3D dome shows about biology and using real structural datasets, I was like "I want to make this happen."

Long story short, it was a success (700,000+ downloads) but producing new content was a super manual process and it wasn't feasible for a small team to produce enough to make it work financially. So we switched to automating the data visualization pipelines, boostrapping through contracts.

Around 2015 when VR became a thing (again), we saw that there was an opportunity beyond a cool way to view our content - for the first time it became possible for non-3d experts to produce 3D content and we realized we could get scientists/researchers to directly import and visualize their data. We worked on the VR creator tools to make this a reality, worked with scientists to visualize their data, worked with our educational partners to adapt the content for educational contexts.

Several pilots and one NIH grant later, we're launching 10k Science on Meta Quest App Lab today. Just in the last couple months, we've done some really exciting work with OpenAI APIs to create audio tours with GPT-powered Q&A around the content (in my opinion, the real game changer here, I'm incredibly excited about it)

You can grab it here, it's free: https://www.meta.com/experiences/5616986801647861/

More info: https://dynamoid.com/blog/10k-science-launch

10k Science: https://10k.science