Seeing the seafloor offshore of Delaware opened my eyes to how much we don’t know about the ocean.

I’m chipping away at a project that brings real places in the ocean to a VR headset with scientific accuracy at its root.

I decided to unveil this test to the public at an event held at our campus in Lewes, DE.

Redbird Reef [38°40′37.22″N, 74°44′19.19″W, -88 ft]
Contoured in the background of this webpage is Redbird Reef, an artificial reef site 20 miles offshore of Delaware.
This exhibit uses sonar data that I collected to create a VR model of the seafloor accurate to less than a foot (10 cm). But this is just the base: layered on top in the future will be real-looking 3D models of the subway cars, shipwrecks, and military tanks that were sunk at the site for fish habitat.
The water is indeed as green and as murky as it looks in the image.

In the future, I’m excited to expand on this to make it appear exactly as the conditions are now, and I want to bring it out of the VR headset to an in person full-scale exhibit.