Kyoto University and major construction firm Kajima have announced the start of a joint study to design a residential facility featuring artificial gravity, which, if successful, could help bring the idea of living on the moon and Mars out of sci-fi movies and into reality.

As countries and businesses race to develop technologies that will allow people to live and travel beyond Earth's atmosphere, the health implications of low gravity on the human body have recently come into focus.

Scientists at Kyoto University’s SIC Human Spaceology Center and Kajima are trying to overcome the challenge by building an inverted cone-shaped residential facility that rotates and creates a centrifugal force, thus achieving a level of gravity equivalent to the one on Earth.