Deepsea: A Meta-ocean Prototype for Undersea Exploration

TL;DR

This paper presents Deepsea, a Meta-ocean prototype utilizing VR technology to create immersive undersea environments, modeling marine creature movements with optimized paths, and demonstrating its potential for enhanced ocean exploration and education.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Meta-ocean prototype with immersive VR visualization, a method for modeling marine life movements, and an optimized path algorithm based on Catmull-Rom splines.

Findings

The prototype provides strong immersion and interactive experience.

The movement modeling method effectively simulates marine creature trajectories.

User study confirms high user engagement and immersion.

Abstract

Metaverse has attracted great attention from industry and academia in recent years. Metaverse for the ocean (Meta-ocean) is the implementation of the Metaverse technologies in virtual emersion of the ocean which is beneficial for people yearning for the ocean. It has demonstrated great potential for tourism and education with its strong immersion and appealing interactive user experience. However, quite limited endeavors have been spent on exploring the full possibility of Meta-ocean, especially in modeling the movements of marine creatures. In this paper, we first investigate the technology status of Metaverse and virtual reality (VR) and develop a prototype that builds the Meta-ocean in VR devices with strong immersive visual effects. Then, we demonstrate a method to model the undersea scene and marine creatures and propose an optimized path algorithm based on the Catmull-Rom spline to model the movements of marine life. Finally, we conduct a user study to analyze our Meta-ocean prototype. This user study illustrates that our new prototype can give us strong immersion and an appealing interactive user experience.