Cosmo's Space Safari 🚀

A friendly, 3D solar-system explorer for kids — tap the planets, learn fun facts, and play. Built to be private, offline, and self-hostable.

Live demo: https://ravismash.github.io/cosmo-space-safari/

What it does

• Explore in 3D — real NASA planet imagery on textured globes, orbit paths, a glowing Sun, Saturn's rings, and the Milky Way. Drag to orbit, pinch/scroll to zoom, tap a planet to fly to it.
• Two age modes (behind a simple parent gate — "tap the 7"):
  • 4–6 Little Explorer — big visuals, a fun fact, audio narration, and Rexy the Space Dino.
  • 7–9 Space Cadet — distance / day / temperature, Q&A, and Captain Nova.
  • 10–12 Scientist — "coming soon."
• Playground of fun:
  • Space Weight & Jump — see what you'd weigh on each world (real gravity), then make the mascot jump — floaty on the Moon, heavy on Jupiter.
  • Alien & Shooting-Star Hunt — catch the 👽 / 🌠 that zip by to fill your Space Explorer Passport with stickers.
  • Build-Your-Own Rocket — pick a nose cone and booster colors, then Launch!
  • Playful synth sound effects (no audio files — all generated in the browser).

Privacy & safety

• No AI, no backend, no analytics, no third-party requests. Nothing leaves the device — preferences and the passport live only in the browser's local storage.
• Content is curated and human-reviewed (based on NASA facts). Sizes and distances are stylized, not to scale.

Run it

It's a static site. Because it uses WebGL (3D), it must be served over http, not opened as a file://:

# from the project folder
python3 -m http.server 8000
# then open http://localhost:8000

Or deploy the folder to any static host (GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel).

Scientist Mode (ages 10–12) — optional AI

The 4–9 app is fully static. The parent-gated 10–12 "Scientist Mode" adds an "Ask Cosmo" box backed by Gemini + Google Search grounding via one serverless route (api/ask-scientist.js). Common questions are answered instantly from a local knowledge base; only open-ended/current ones call the API.

To enable it, deploy to a host that runs serverless functions (Vercel):

1. Import this repo in Vercel (it auto-detects the static site + api/ route).
2. Add an environment variable GEMINI_API_KEY (server-side) — get a key at https://aistudio.google.com/apikey . It is never sent to the browser.
3. Deploy. Without the key (e.g. on plain GitHub Pages), Scientist Mode still answers curated questions and shows a friendly fallback for the rest.

Safety: input filter + rate limit + topic blocklist + conservative Gemini safety settings + output validation + canned fallback. No questions, answers, or IPs are stored. These answers are grounded, not guaranteed — Cosmo "searches trusted space sources and explains the answer simply."

Project layout

index.html            the whole app (markup, styles, logic)
assets/               planet textures + Milky Way (JPG) and Saturn ring (PNG)
vendor/               three.js (r160) + OrbitControls
REQUIREMENTS.md       full requirements

Credits

• Planet & star imagery: Solar System Scope textures (CC BY 4.0); Pluto photo by NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI (New Horizons, public domain).
• 3D engine: three.js (MIT).
• Narration uses the browser's built-in Web Speech API; sound effects are synthesized with the Web Audio API.

License

Original code and art (the app, the mascots, the UI) are released under the MIT License — see LICENSE. Bundled third-party textures and libraries keep their own licenses, noted above.