Eshan Maitra
Virtual Reality gadgets are the latest tech craze of our time. Though companies like Microsoft and Google pushing it for entertainment purposes, some scientists found even greater use for this amazing technology.
If you have watched the Ridley Scott’s movie ‘Prometheus’ (2012), you already have guessed about the process. Firstly, the researching teams are sending Remotely Controlled Vehicles (ROV) to capture the images of the area, then transferring all the data to a VR processing software.
This practically allowing these scientists to walk through the ocean beds and the caving corners, and have an intimate close look of the surfaces under-water.
Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany thought of a brilliant approach, is to only travel in those vents once with a ROV and processing whatever imaging they can do to form in a VR software. This software wouldn’t require precise details, rather just gist of the context to build up the world of VR.
But after all the struggle when they successfully placed all the data into VR the team was more than amazed. “It’s a very compelling experience to see a black smoker field and feel your way around.
Suddenly you don’t bump [the ROV] into things anymore because you can turn your head and see that spire you are about to knock into.”, Kwasnitschka added about his experience.
By far, humankind have only explored 5 percent of the 70 percent of waters that cover the Earth. Someday, with this new approach more and more mysteries of Earth might get unraveled. (They might even find the Loch Ness Monster!)