What you’ll learn:
- How OceanX explorers utilize augmented reality.
- What tools were used to generate the 3D views of sea life?
If you’re looking to stream some interesting video, then check out James Cameron’s “OceanXplorers” series on National Geographic. It has sharks and augmented-reality (AR) headsets just to make things fun. The crew that included scientists and videographers sailed on the OceanX science vessel designed for research and multimedia (Fig. 1). We had a special look at the AR support in the video (watch the video above).
The OceanX supports a helicopter and two submersibles: the Neptune and Nadir. Each is capable of diving to depths of 1,000 meters. They can operate up to three days at a time. There’s also a media studio on-board that provides the AR support.
The cameras used to record the animals in their environment included the Canon C300mk2 with Sigma Prime Lenses (Fig. 2). The first episode examines sharks, while subsequent episodes look at other sea life such as whales.
The exploration and presentation of the conventional video is informative. However, it’s the AR that takes the research to the next level. Ncam Reality made the recording possible and the Unity game engine was leveraged to render the 3D images via Microsoft's Hololens 2 (Fig. 3).
Augmented reality allows scientists to view not only the exterior we normally see, but also examine extrapolated details of the interior of an animal.
The Hololens 2 is now targeting industrial applications in this manner. A host of other AR glasses as well as mixed-reality headsets like Meta’s Quest 3 provide AR support that would be capable of viewing these 3D images.
The BBC’s Orla Doherty noted, “Creating 3D holograms on a moving ship during a mission, either to plan an experiment beneath the waves or to analyze results from a mission, was a technological hurdle that challenged everybody involved, from the team at Microsoft who grappled with oceanographic data streams and engineering complexities, to the team at OceanX who marshalled their ideas to the team at Ncam whose clever cameras were able to capture the OceanXplorers AND their holograms all together in camera!”
