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A need to engage (master’s) students in the stakes of conducting marine science research is a primary concern of several courses in the geosciences. A great deal of time is spent enabling students to expand their knowledge of the instrument capabilities proper to at-sea research, but also to have them witness the ongoings of living and working under the several hurdles of oceanography fieldwork. 

But due to the logistic and financial constraints of (scarce) ship-time, most graduate students cannot learn from fieldwork itself. At the UU, a novel package of virtual oceanographic fieldwork, the Virtual Ship Classroom offers a solution for this.

The Virtual Ship Classroom addresses this shortage by mirroring some of the research aims and work implied by going out onto the ocean on a (NIOZ) research vessel. The first virtual scenario is a Python tool that allows for realistic measurements over a layout of ship time and with mappings of instrument deployments. The second, a further step into building the hands-on practicality involved in fieldwork, is a virtual reality video library that has been trialled twice with groups of graduate students.

What does the VR scenario look like?

The overarching theme of the VR videos is life aboard a research vessel, mimicking several topical issues such as the hows and whens of drifter and CTD deployment, as well as ADCP use, but also the day-to-day routines of several crew members, technicians, and scientists. The educational possibilities of 360º footage allow for a completely innovative way to acquaint students with the potentialities of research vessels and their different scientific spaces in a quasi-embodied experience of fieldwork. 

The quality and the 360 view are really good and the response of the VR glasses to my movements was fast and felt like reality.

Ranging from three to six minutes in duration, groups of three videos were shown in a room with six headsets active at the same time. Virtual Ship VR users attest to its “quality and the 360 view being really good. The response of the VR glasses to my movements was fast and felt like reality” and a sense of “total immersion, and that the people in the video were talking to me” –  in the words of some of the students who participated in the try-outs and adjoining surveys in December 2024 and February 2025.

As soon as the VR goggles are put on, the user can feel themselves surrounded by the sonic landscape of a ship harbour, the splattering waves of the sea, and the lull of seabirds’ call, all the while attending to the explanations on ways to manage CTD (network failures). Or following a ship tour led by a vessel’s captain while already envisioning their home-at-sea life in a scientist’s cabin. 

Results

The outcomes of this VR immersiveness are rather promising, with a success rate and positive feedback of over 80%. Because the Virtual Ship Classroom has a core of design-based research which adjusts itself according to the feedback of student-users, we are now addressing unsolved shortcomings, such as beholding “work under some rougher sea conditions” and fixing “perspective and scale resolution, as well as user’s eye height adequacy”. 

New videos will issue during 2025 exploring other instruments, ways of measuring and predicting, fuller 360º footage of deployments, and an expansion of the VR precepts with several gamification effects, such as user-interaction through menu choice and longer interactive scenarios.