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Did that otter really just clock me square in the eyes – or did I imagine it? And why are thousands of krill crowding in on me? Am I leading the sperm whale forward or is the whale walking me? These questions and more rushed through my mind as I entered the immersion of BBC Earth’s Life in VR, a virtual documentary that fuses the wonder of underwater natural history with the heady delights of virtual reality.

Off the coast of California, in the Pacific Ocean’s Monterey Bay, your journey begins on the open ocean. A mother otter and her pup bob about among little boats before the first plunge is underway, and you’re floating down beneath the surface, the afternoon sunlight shimmering down into the shallow waters.


Underneath the water's surface, a bevy of otters darts about, their elegant bodies snaking through the sea kelp forest, glimpsing you – a virtual interloper – every so often. These otters (the furriest creatures on earth per square inch, their creators inform me) dive for sea urchins, all part of a natural cycle which keeps the health of the kelp forest intact. “If the otters don’t eat the urchin, then the kelp forest is destroyed,” says Phil Stuart at Preloaded, the BAFTA-award-winning games studio that has collaborated with BBC Studios in building this aquatic marvel.

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“The story is the story of the food chain: it’s the story of the interlocking dependencies of each of these animals, and how that is in turn part of the ecosystem you’re travelling through,” says Tom Burton, who led the project from BBC Studios’ end.

The team behind Life in VR has been painstakingly authentic in its representation of this ecosystem, from timings to distances to the location of the whale’s blowhole. The primary narrative drive of the experience takes you through an accurate twelve-hour cycle, guided through its chapters by key creatures along the journey. “When, for example, the sea otters are diving for the urchin in the afternoon, the Humboldt squid are going back over the trench just as days come to an end, because they hunt at night in the depths,” says Stuart.


As you latch onto the inquisitive otter, you’re propelled further and further into the ocean, where an army of squid rises between the kelp, and a swarm of zooplankton sucks you in. “Zooplankton is the thing that krill feed on, and then the squid feed on the krill, and then the largest predator of this ecosystem – the sperm whale – feeds on the squid,” Stuart says.

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“It’s not always the ‘hero’ animals that are important," explains Bradley Crooks, head of digital entertainment and games at BBC Studios. "There’s this interrelationship going on.”

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The launch of Life in VR coincides with the release of the Lenovo Mirage Solo, a Daydream VR headset. Life is designed to be used with Google’s WorldSense tracking technology, which understands your movements without the need for external sensors. This affords new levels of agency within the virtual world, as its animals and organisms respond to the forward and sideways movements of the viewer as they journey through its milestones.


VR is an active rather than a passive medium; it enables viewers to engage with the environment in an unprecedented way, making choices in their trajectory, peeking around and above, edging forwards and back – even the bobbing waves authentically refract the sun’s rays. The real challenge is balancing this exploratory freedom with a necessarily linear narrative drive.

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Elements of subtle gamification help provide structure: it quickly becomes clear that to move through the story in a linear way, the viewer must be led by the animals through the water. White dots – like a kind of touchstone – pepper the underwater journey, and by clicking on these dots, you can unlock new crevices in the ocean world, revealing, for instance, a school of Garibaldi fish which deviate from the overarching story.

But the creators of Life in VR were cautious not to make it overly mechanistic, and there are no levels or point-scoring, which results in a more free-flowing experience. “What can we do to actually create something that’s low threshold?” asks Crooks. “That’s actually about [people] going in and being entertained and enjoying themselves, that isn’t vastly locked into games mechanics and things like this, something with broad appeal… but at the same time, mirroring the programme to some extent, that fills people with a sense of awe and wonder?”

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The team behind the platform clearly has hopes for the adoption of VR as a more ordinary feature of people’s cultural diet. “This was an opportunity to demonstrate the value of VR as a medium to tell new stories,” says Stuart, adding that natural history documentary has always employed new technology to communicate the sense of awe the natural world can instill.

Time-lapse photography, for instance, has been used to show the way that plants grow; night vision to show the way leopards hunt and drones to capture those moments you can’t get from the ground. Adding a modern spin to the BBC’s old Reithian remit to ‘inform, entertain and educate,’ Burton says, “there’s an old strapline which the brand team would probably kill me for mentioning... which is: ‘facts and magic,’ which I think really sums up what we’re trying to achieve here.”

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The team’s meticulous attention to representing the coast’s marine biology is offset by a more stylistic approach to designing their world. They were constrained by elements of Google’s Daydream platform in how photo-realistic they could be, but in the end the stylisation was a blessing, they say. This is obvious at certain moments: when entering the world of the zooplankton, for instance, or when the sperm whale sends out its sonar rays in the chase for the giant squid – something that would of course be invisible to the naked eye, but feels, within the world of Life, like a moment of intense drama.

There were of course challenges along the way. “You wouldn’t believe how many conversations we’ve had about the kelp in the last year,” Burton says, and one of the show’s designers talked through the lengthy process involved in refining the swishing kelp, organic movements which are notoriously difficult to animate. The team’s designers managed to cut out unnecessary fronds to create something believable, and the kelp’s movements are not pre-programmed but move in a looser way.

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They also had to keep up a very high frame rate in order to avoid people feeling sick, which is a real consideration when working in VR because of the viewer’s ability to scan around. In a normal show, you need about 25-30 frames per second, but in VR “you need to be up at 60, maybe 90 frames per second, otherwise your brain as you move your head starts to see judders, and that makes you feel ill,” Burton says.

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The team is really excited about certain technical feats, such as the "real-time behaviour system" which means its otters really are looking into your eyes and responding to your personal path through the deeps. While AI might be overdoing it a bit, the animals really are “free-roaming in the sense that they’re not scripted and necessarily choreographed to come to those points – they’re given a little life of their own and a task that they’re performing.” These one-to-one moments and encounters really are arresting, as it becomes clear that the animals are in some sense autonomous and aware of you.

They also used a GPU instancing technique – a graphics processing unit which accelerates image creation – to bring to life an immersive crowd of 16,000 krill. “This is a real-time VR experience on mobile,” Stuart says.


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The Lenovo Mirage lets the wearer move with six degrees of freedom, so the Life creators had to reprogramme the whole experience, which was originally released in three degrees, to make the environment more reactive. For instance, in six degrees the viewer can move through the kelp, where before they weren’t able to – if you put your head into the kelp in six degrees, it shies away from you.

Hundreds of such moments thread through this self-contained world, lending Life in VR a high degree of "returnability" – with subtle changes and unexplored corners in this mystical universe throwing up new wonders. On reflection, I think the whale must have been walking me.