Mars colony becomes a virtual reality

Australian students have built a virtual reality city to house one million people on Mars as part of an international competition to create an imagined utopian settlement on the red planet by 2030.

Students from Melbourne's RMIT University have engineered a self-sustaining, modular habitat - the Nova Domus - which is a biosphere which can accommodate 20,000 people and expand as the population grows.

The project has been built on the NASA-backed virtual reality simulation game Mars 2030 which gives people a 3D Martian experience without having to travel 55 million kilometres to get there.

More than 750,000 students and professionals worldwide have participated in a series of engineering and design challenges over the six-month competition run by US computer giant HP.

Speaking at a Sydney event on Tuesday, co-team leader Dana Mateluna said the project was beyond anything she'd experienced in normal classes.

"Being able to self-manage ourselves, and gain those new skills on the job ... I came in with basic modelling skills and came out making something in VR basically over a weekend," she told AAP.

Ms Mateluna, who is studying sustainable systems engineering and industrial design, said their group had tried to balance science with humanity to create a city habitat where people could live - not just exist.

She hopes to use her virtual skills to solve real problems and build low-impact infrastructure in Cambodia which can support people as well as the environment.

But a real long-term habitat on Mars is probably a long way off, she admits, saying the project highlighted the many problems of settling on the red planet.

A six-part documentary featuring Ms Mateluna and her colleagues, including students from Curtin University in Perth, will air in Australia in August when the competition winners will also be announced.

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