Implementation of Virtual Sea Environment with 3D Whale Animation

Abstract

Global marine tourism is emerging as a new blue ocean, and VR/AR technology is coming to our real world. This research concerns virtual sea environment development to make marine tourism more accessible and safer. The importance of our research is that virtual tourism is more cost efficient and accessible while being more immersive and entertaining than traditional TV or Radios. We have researched different wave spectra models to simulate the sea environment in Ulsan, Korea. Wind speed is used as a main disturbing force of the sea and gravity constant as a restoring force. The processing workload on CPU were reduced by utilizing GPU for heavy calculations. The results of this marine environment study were applied to the development of contents for whale tourism. We developed the 3D whale animation using the Unity. The scene was presented to people on the whale watching tour boat. The survey data showed interest and support from participants. We could render sea surface in real-time and simulate Ulsan sea environment with various wind speeds.