Enso Unites with TNC to Create VR Experience

You may remember Sebastian the crab in The Little Mermaid singing to Ariel, trying to convince her to remain under the sea.

The lyrics – “Just look at the world around you/ right here on the ocean floor/ such wonderful things around you/ what more is you looking for?” – clearly highlight the wonder of the ocean and he does well to remind us of the splendor beneath the water’s surface.

However, it’s been 27 years since Disney released this cartoon classic and a lot has changed to the ocean’s floor.

Environmental organization The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has today launched a new VR campaign in partnership with Enso and produced through MPC VR to address many of these problems and teach the public about the benefits of ocean sustainability and encourage more technology to be used in ocean projects.

The idea of the This is Our Future campaign – which will run for many years – is to reconnect people to nature.

To launch the campaign, MPC has created a VR experience (trailer below) that primarily focusses on the tuna fisheries industry in an attempt to cull overfishing.

Viewers will get to experience firsthand the problems affecting the fishing industries and could lead to more funding for tech-enabled monitoring at sea or encourage more investment in resources.

Next month, TNC will launch a competition on Kaggle.com to get data scientists involved and address the issues affecting the industry in a bid to speed up the research process and improve automation. Key influencers like Facebook’s VP of monetisation Matt Idema, Kaggle engineers Tray Chou and Anthony Goldbloom and artists Yosi Sergant have got behind the campaign, hoping that they will be able to inspire action from their respective communities.