Ocean Site One Projects
Student Project: Ocean Site One Virtual Reality Mini Games
Team: Anthony Yu Chun Lin, Cameron Ung, Christian Cuellar, Elijah Villanueva, John Freeman, Muska Mustafa, Camila Yeremin, Joaquin Arredondo, Josh Hall
Project Goals: The Ocean Sight One (OSO) VR experience is an immersive, interactive virtual reality environment that allows users to engage with the sea ecology integrated into California’s offshore oil platforms through embodied, first-person engagement. Users adopt the role of a student intern working for the Love Lab, a marine biology research center at UC Santa Barbara, and complete tasks that support the preservation of this delicate ecosystem. By combining real-world data and casual gameplay-based learning, the experience invites participants to engage directly with marine life, understand the ecological role of the platforms, and ultimately foster greater awareness of and empathy for this unique and precious environmental system.
Offshore oil platforms along the California coast, particularly near Santa Barbara, were originally built in the mid-20th century to extract petroleum from rich underwater reserves, becoming symbols of industrial expansion as well as environmental risk—especially after events like the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, which galvanized public opposition and shaped long-standing negative perceptions of these structures . Over time, however, scientific research has revealed a more complex reality: as oil production declined, the submerged structures of these platforms were colonized by marine organisms, transforming them into highly productive artificial reefs. Mussels, barnacles, anemones, and sponges attach to the platform bases, creating habitat that attracts fish species such as rockfish and lingcod, leading to biodiversity levels that can exceed those of nearby natural reefs. These ecosystems now support dense marine populations and contribute to fisheries, creating a paradox in which structures once viewed solely as environmental hazards are also recognized as valuable ecological habitats, complicating decisions about their removal or preservation.
Student Project: Cal Poly Pier Virtual Reality
Team: Alec Evans, Kaitlyn Le, Annika Bullock, David Lock, Jaclyn Brodersen, Martin Wise, Trisha Guha
Project Goals: The Cal Poly Pier VR team's mission is to assist the OSO researchers in creating a proof-of-concept, small-scale immersive experience incorporating 360-video, storytelling, audio, digital assets, animation, and VR the OSO researchers can reference when they write an NSF grant proposal over the next 2 quarters. The content of this experience will be centered around the diving training done at the Cal Poly Pier and will require both above ground and underwater phases. The main portion of the 360-video needed for the experience has already been filmed and it will be the focus of the team to design and incorporate an interface a user can effectively use to navigate and interact with the experience. The team will also create additional content to enhance the experience including standard video, 360-video, audio, and text and explore what are the best methods for users to interact with this additional content.
Deliverables
The end deliverables for this team are to design and develop a user interface to navigate a VR experience about diving training conducted at the Cal Poly Pier and provide additional media assets to enhance the experience. Both the user interface and additional media assets must be thoroughly user tested at each phase of development.
Student Project: Cal Poly Pier Mixed Reality Documentary
Team: Casey Hartley, Elyssa Abbott, Aidan Ream, Trisha Guha, Carter O'neill, Ben Geil
Project Goals: The Cal Poly Pier VR team's mission is to explore best practices for using 360 video, audio, and digital assets to compose a documentary of the Cal Poly pier highlighting its origin, function as a university and public resource, and how it will evolve over the next 5-10 years. After collecting historical and current data on the pier through a review of historical documents and interviews with staff, faculty, and students presently working on day-to-day operations, marine research, and industrial projects, this team will compose a treatment (script and storyboard) to present the pier's story using mixed reality. To understand the impact of different methods to storytelling in VR and 360 video, the team will create and test short example experiences using 360 video, audio, and digital assets. All information collected and generated by the team will be used by the Ocean Sight One collective to fully realize an interactive and immersive Cal Poly pier documentary.