2/4/2025 | 8:40 AM - 10:30 AM | Grand Peninsula D

NEMO Explorer XR – The development of an ocean-based immersive co-design environment

Author(s)

Alyssa Liu | Royal College of Art
Rian Stephens | Royal College of Art
Elise Hodson | Royal College of Arts
Carla Amaral | Royal College of Art
Christopher Ross | Royal College of Art
Jasmine Black | Royal College of Art
Paul Anderson | Royal College of Art
Ashley Hall | Royal College of Art
Bjorn Sommer | Royal College of Art

Abstract

The NEMO project (New Economic Model for the Oceans) tackles ocean-related issues from a design perspective.

The initial NEMO project is based on an experimental data gathering using 4K cameras to capture objects along a ship voyage of 6,070 nautical miles from Kangerlussuaq (Greenland) to Poole (UK) via Sardinia (Italy). This data was combined with recorded GPS coordinates to visualize the journey using the Cesium.js environment (Hall et al., 2024). Several objects were identified and mapped to the corresponding locations of the ship trajectory.

In this work, we are using this initial web visualization as starting point to create an UNREAL engine-based immersive environment which can be explored within the new RCA SNAP Visualisation Lab facility. Based on a previous co-design workshop locally ran at the RNLI headquarters in Poole, we started to explore opportunities to enable similar experiences in an immersive 3D environment.

In this way, we are enabling collaborative data visualization and exploration. Based on an annotation functionality, users can interact with the data in the context of co-design workshops.

In this way, we are combining Macro-Meso-Micro perspectives with the purpose to provide on one hand a holistic overview of the journey, and on the other hand enable place-based exploration of ocean- and coast-related scenarios.