DeepSea Nexus: Connecting with your oceans through Extended Reality

DeepSea NEXUS Project: This interdisciplinary project brings together researchers from marine science, machine learning (ML), sonic and immersive arts and developled an interdisciplinary workflow to experience a range of complex marine datasets simultaneously. This holistic sensory approach to data science is expected to increase a sense of connection to our oceans and the rate at which scientific insights are made.

We developed two VR rooms:

Sponge room: In this room you can experience the behaviour of a cold-water coral reef sponge, Mycale lingua. Here, you are inside the sponge which you should see contract or “sneeze”. The sounds you hear are the tidal current speeds, which increase and decrease with the changing tides. When the tides reach the high or low water mark, the water movement stops, making it quieter. When they are transitioning from high to low or visa versa, the current speeds increase and the sounds become louder. The green bubbles, which become visible, are food reaching the sponge, more food is indicated by larger bubbles. PhD student Poppy Clark is currently investigating when and why the sponge contracts using machine-learning¹ and statistical approaches. The data is from a Norwegian cold-water coral reef at 240 m depth.

Sound room: In this room you are experiencing the soundscape of a deep-sea sponge ground. Sounds and images were collected in this sponge ground. Here, you are surrounded by acoustic data points, organised in clouds based on their similarity. While touching and hearing the sounds, you can explore if they correlate to any of the fish and crabs seen in the image data. Dr. Laurence De Clippele is currently investigating which species produce which sounds using both manual and machine-learning approaches. The data are from a Canadian sponge ground at a depth of 150-200 m.

Timeline: August 2024- July 2025

1. Clark, H.P., Smith, A.G., McKay Fletcher, D., Larsson, A.I., Jaspars, M. and De Clippele, L.H., 2024. New interactive machine learning tool for marine image analysis. Royal Society Open Science, 11(5), p.231678. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231678

TEAM

Dr Laurence De Clippele (PI), Dr Iain Findlay-Walsh (Co-I) & Dr Tiffany Vlaar (Co-I)

Research Assistant: Dr Jordan Henderson

FUNDING

University of Glasgow, Crucible Seed Funding Award, £7,398