It was an honor to join OceanX Education for a series of events aboard the OceanXplorer research vessel, and support the OceanX Portal program with immersive experiences in two GeoDome Portals. Thursday, September 19, marked the Southeast Asian premiere of National Geographic’s “OceanXplorers” series, and OceanX hosted a screening and panel discussion for nearly 120 guests. An inflatable 3m-diameter Portal was set up in a networking area, creating an immersive experience for visitors to the bar. Guests also interacted with a second Portal, this one with a semi-permanent 3.7m-diameter dome. On Friday, September 20, OceanX welcomed the organization’s more than 300 global partners to explore the ship and the OceanX Portals.

In the Portals, guests stepped inside 360° video of the oceans near the Seychelles. This high-resolution footage is captured by Nadir, a mobile marine studio in a Triton submersible that broadcasts the work of Neptune, a partner submersible with a research team on board. They also interacted with Dive & Discover, a game developed by OceanX in collaboration with students at the MAGES Institute in Singapore using the Unity game engine, based on Seychelles footage from Nadir. WorldViewer enabled all the content for interactive display in the GeoDome Portals. It’s easy for the OceanX team to add and refresh content in the 360° video experience. Our SuperCubeMapper texture sharing solution ported MAGES’ Unity game into the dome with real-time geometry correction. And this project marks the first integration of Matterport into GeoDome systems, using the Electron software framework in much the same way we enabled the new versions of NASA JPL’s Eyes platforms.

We’re proud that the OceanX team has chosen the GeoDome to create immersive experiences for their clients partners, and excited to continue to push WorldViewer and explore new content capabilities.