Sir David Attenborough – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

February 10, 2022

The Green Planet AR Experience Opens its Doors in London Tomorrow

A year ago gmw3 reported on Sir David Attenborough once again lending his narration skills to another immersive project, The Green Planet AR Experience. An in-person augmented reality (AR) experience inspired by the natural history series, tomorrow it’ll open for the first time; located at Piccadilly Circus in London, UK.

A collaborative effort created by Factory 42 with BBC Studios and powered by EE’s 5G network, The Green Planet AR Experience offers guests the chance to wander through six digitally enhanced environments – including rainforests, freshwater and saltwater worlds, and desert landscapes.

Upon entering the experience guests are provided with a 5G-enabled smartphone: “which acts as their dynamic window into the world of plants.” They’ll also get to enjoy the company of a virtual Sir David Attenborough who’ll guide them on this natural history adventure.

“You’ll see that plants can be as aggressive, competitive and dramatic as any living thing on the planet – and how they form intriguing relationships with animals. And you’ll discover why plants are so vital for the future of our planet. Your device is a window into a secret world,” says Sir David Attenborough in a statement.

The Green Planet AR Experience takes around 40-60 minutes is free to attend but tickets are limited, released periodically. There are none available for the initial opening but more tickets will be released on 17th February so make sure to keep an eye out. The entire event runs until 9th March 2022.

The entire project is the work of The Green Planet 5G AR Consortium, made up of six creative, technology and scientific organisations. It was one of nine projects to win £2.2m GBP funding from the UK government’s 5G Create competition backed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

For continued updates on the latest AR use cases, keep reading gmw3.

January 13, 2021

Experience David Attenborough’s The Green Planet as a 5G AR App

David Attenborough’s next project The Green Planet, focuses on flora and fauna from across the world and thanks to a new collaborative effort will be turned into an augmented reality (AR) experience.

Led by immersive content studio Factory 42, BBC Studios, mobile network EE, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Talesmith and Dimension Studios have announced The Green Planet 5G AR Consortium to create the AR experience and promote 5G technology.

Awarded £2.2 million GBP as part of the 5G Create competition, the consortium’s AR app will allow you to explore this fascinating subject from the perspective of plants. You’ll be able to use an AR-capable device to nurture rare and exotic plants, observing their behaviour whilst encountering the various animals that live among them.

“The importance of protecting the planet has never been greater and the opportunity to use emerging technologies to engage audiences of all ages in environmental issues in new ways is hugely exciting,” said John Cassy, Founder and CEO, Factory 42 said. “We’re delighted to have pulled together a unique consortium of world-leading organisations and look forward to showing how 5G networks will enhance our everyday lives and our understanding of the world around us.”

“5G Create is about exploring new and inventive ways we can use 5G to give British industries a competitive advantage. This cutting-edge app, fronted by broadcasting legend Sir David Attenborough, is set to be an inspiring example of how new technology can reconnect us with the natural world whilst demonstrating the power of 5G to a huge new audience,” said Matt Warman, Minister for Digital Infrastructure.

As the project is all about showcasing the power of 5G the interactive experience will be available “in a number of set locations” around the UK notes Factory 42. How many and where have yet to be finalised. The Green Planet AR will be released in 2022, plenty of time to get a compatible 5G device.

For further updates, keep reading VRFocus.

November 3, 2018

David Attenborough’s VR Experience ‘Hold the World’ Lands on Rift

Hold the World (2018) is an educational VR experience from Sky that lets you come face-to-face with Sir David Attenborough, the English broadcaster and world’s foremost naturalist, as he teaches you about a number of species going as far back as the Trilobite and as recent as the flea.

The interactive experience takes you to London’s Natural History Museum, and puts you in reach of a few rare specimens from its world-famous collection, letting you handle and resize the objects while Attenborough teaches you important facts about how the animals must have lived, ate, breathed, and more.

Attenborough is presented to the user by way of high-quality volumetric video capture, and he takes you behind the scenes to a few areas out-of-bounds to the general public. Like the items themselves, the environments have been captured using photogrammetry, allowing you to truly feel like you’re in iconic museum’s geology library, fossil lab, and herbarium.

Skeletons and fossilized specimens come to life as well, showing you a true 1:1 scale of how a Pterosaur must have flown, or how a dragon-fly independently controls each of its four wings as it makes its long migratory trips across the world.

At $4, the experience is undoubtedly one the best price to value ratios out there; everything is lovingly reconstructed to maximize for realism, truly making you feel like you’re sitting across the table with the affable and always knowledgeable Sir David Attenborough. It took me about an hour to complete, going through every animal presented in the experience and taking the few quick quizzes to go along with it. It’s truly something that could be made into a larger series, as I found sitting across from Attenborough and learning with the object in hand to be a really effective way of absorbing the information.

Life in 360˚: Serenity

It’s Monday, and I don’t know about you but boy was the weekend stressful. I’m not sure why it was exactly, but the fates conceived that from Friday night all the way through to Sunday night that everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong.

Life In 360° / 360 Degree Video Starting the weekend frazzled doesn’t do anyone any good whatsoever – least of all me – so I thought we’d ease into a no doubt busy Monday with a more relaxing 360 degree video than normal. And we’re doing it with something from the team at Holosphere VR.

When it comes to the healthcare industry there are many ongoing studies, a number of which we have featured from time to time on VRFocus, that have focused on the idea of using virtual reality (VR) as a means to rehabilitate or to reduce pain. Such is the origin of today’s video, as Holosphere explain.

“When St Giles Hospice approached us with the challenge of creating a room-scale virtual meditation experience, we thought the potential applications sounded very exciting and had great potential to help people who endure the daily struggle of chronic pain. Holosphere worked with medical professionals from St Giles to create the lush, calming environment of the Forest of Serenity.”

Results were positive, as Dr Sheila Popert, Medical Director at St Giles Hospice recalls: “One patient with intractable pain from mesothelioma was asked about his pain following a VR session said ‘What pain? For the first time in six months, I completely forgot that I had any pain’.”

Impressive stuff. At a later date the team adapted the room-scale experience to a 360 degree video, all voiced by the soothing and knowledgeable tones of Sir David Attenborough.

You too can take a walk through the Forest of Serenity below. Life in 360˚ will be back with another 360 degree video this coming Wednesday.

March 31, 2018

Sir David Attenborough Fed A VR Dinosaur At Yorkshire Museum Exhibition

A new virtual reality (VR) exhibition at Yorkshire Museum in the UK has opened allowing visitors to feed dinosaurs. As part of the unveiling broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough attended the exhibition.

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The ‘Jurassic World’ exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum invited visitors to travel back through 150 million years of Yorkshire history to discover lost giants and the changing worlds they inhabited. Taking visitors from the depths of the deepest part of the ocean to the ancient coasts and tropical shallows, visitors will be able to meet dinosaurs and sea monster that once roamed the landscape. Thanks to the latest technology and research, the exhibition aims to bring visitors closer then ever before to the history of the dinosaurs including a chance to feed one.

Created by Immotions Manchester Studio, the educational VR content takes a user back to the late Cretaceous Period where they will be up close with a fully scaled Argentinosaurus. Here, using a HTC Vive, they will be able to reach out and feed the stunning creature as it goes about its life only a few feet from the user. As part of the unveiling event for the exhibition Sir David Attenborough attended and was even able to feed said dinosaur himself, experiencing the immersive wounder that is VR.

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Martin Higginson, Executive Chairman of Immotion Group, said: “We are delighted to work with The Yorkshire Museum and put our immersive VR experience at the centre of this new and exciting Jurassic World exhibition. We were also very happy to see Sir David Attenborough, who is nothing short of a national treasure, open the exhibition. We hope that this unique and interactive display inspires a new generation of palaeontologists and natural historians.”

This is not the first time Sir David Attenborough has been embracing the latest in VR technology as he in involved in a VR experience titled Hold The World where users can get one-on-one time with him and explore a number of rare fossils.

The ‘Jurassic World’ exhibition is now open at the Yorkshire Museum and is a long term exhibition and will be open for at least the next two years.

For more stories like this in the future, keep reading VRFocus.

March 11, 2018

Trailer Released For David Attenborugh’s Next VR Project

Sir David Attenborough is collaborating with Sky Television and the London Natural History Museum on an immersive learning experience.

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The project was announced last year but now a trailer along with new details have been released. The virtual reality (VR) experience will allow users to immerse themselves in the London Natural History Museum in a one-on-one audience with the world-renowned, Sir David Attenborough.

Titled Hold The World, viewers will be able to get hands-on with virtual recreations of some of the oldest and rarest fossils in the world, as well as skulls and other bones belonging to extinct creatures. All of this is of course accompanied by Sir David Attenborough, who was filmed by more than 100 camera to allow for a highly detailed digitally recreation. Users will be able to pick up, hold, enlarge and expand the rare objects, offering unparalleled access to explore and learn about some of the world’s rarest natural history specimens.

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Talking about the project Sir David Attenborough said: ”Sharing my passion for the natural world is something I have done for many years through different technologies, from the days of black-and-white TV to colour, HD, 3D, 4K and now virtual reality. Hold the World is an extraordinary next step in how we can communicate and educate people about experiences they wouldn’t usually have access to in the real world. I am delighted about what users can learn and discover from the Natural History Museum’s treasures in this new VR experience – it really is one of the most convincing and bewitching experiences that the world of technology has yet produced.”

The experience is said to last between 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the how users choice to journey through the experience. A number of locations from the museum are available meaning a user is free to explore at their own pace and spend as much time with Sir David Attenborough as they wish. You can see a trailer for Hold The World below which offers a taste of the experience along with a short interview from Sir David.

Hold The World will be releasing in Spring within the Sky VR app on Google Daydream View, Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift.

Other VR projects in a similar vain include the British Museum’s Two Million Years of History and Humanity project, which is available now on the Oculus Store and the VR recreation of destroyed artifacts from the Mosul Museum.

For more updates on Hold The World in the future, keep reading VRFocus.

October 10, 2017

Dave Ranyard: What Makes a Great Immersive Experience?

VRFocus sat down with Dave Ranyard, CEO of Reality Dream Interactive at Open City Documentary Festival to talk about what he’s working on now, how artificial intelligence (A.I.) will change storytelling and the pitfalls of interactivity in immersive technologies.

After twenty years of working at Sony on augmented and virtual videogames, Ranyard decided to set up Reality Dream Interactive. At the moment he’s working on a project called Hold the World with sir David Attenborough and the Natural History Museum as well as a couple of unannounced projects.

Ranyard explains in the video interview below how he’s incredibly excited to finally use his knowledge on A.I. as computers are now finally able to scale and compute in order to do something real. He also discusses how non-fiction VR films that are short and with good intent or approach to storytelling have had a great impact on charities using them to showcase and educate the world on various topics. Ranyard also warns creators that if interactivity or volumetric VR does not necessarily make the experience better and can ultimately distract from a strong narrative.

To find out more about what makes a great immersive experience watch the video below.

April 24, 2017

First Ever BAFTA Awarded To a VR Project

BAFTA have been gradually letting virtual reality (VR) in to the rather exclusive club of movies and TV which are worthy of being nominated for any of BAFTA’s awards. Up until now, though, none had ever made it into the winner’s circle.

David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef Dive VR has won an award for Digital Creativity at the BAFTA TV Craft Awards, the first time a VR experience has won a BAFTA of any kind. The VR experience takes viewers down into the ocean to experience the underwater world of coral, colourful fish and dangerous reef sharks. Travelling in a high-tech submersible, Attenborough guides viewers through the intricate reef systems that make up the Great Barrier Reef.

Anthony Geffen, CEO at Atlantic Productions says: “This is a landmark moment for virtual reality as a medium and we are immensely proud to be at the forefront of this content revolution. We are delighted that BAFTA has recognised the risk-taking and innovation which is vital in pioneering a new form of filmmaking – and highlighted the massive leaps which the format has made. At a time when the Great Barrier Reef has never been more under threat, we hope that our experience in this immersive medium will continue to inspire and galvanise the public to engage in its conservation.”

The Great Barrier Reef Dive VR has been demonstrated all over the world to audiences at London’s Natural History Museum, the Australian Museum in Sydney and the Trondheim Science Museum in Norway.

David Attenborough himself will be bringing his distinctive voice to another VR experience, as VRFocus reported recently, with the upcoming historical VR experience Hold The world where VR users will be able to get hands-on with fossils and ancient bones.

VRFocus will continue to bring you news of award-winning VR experiences.

April 24, 2017

David Attenborough To Host VR History Lesson

Sir David Attenborough is widely regarded in Britain as a national treasure. Entire generations have learned about the wonders of the natural world thanks to his dulcet tones narrating over magnificent sights of whales, insects, lions and gorillas. Thanks to a collaboration between the London Natural History Museum and Sky Television, Sir David will soon be bringing natural history to virtual reality (VR).

The new collaboration is titled ‘Hold The World’ and is said to be a mixture of videogame and TV documentary. The viewer will have the opportunity to get hands-on with virtual re-creations of some of the oldest and rarest fossils in the world, as well as skulls and other bones belonging to creatures that are long extinct, all narrated by Attenborough.

Attenborough had this to say about the project: “Hold The World offers people a unique opportunity: to examine rare objects, some millions of years old, up close. It represents an extraordinary new step in how people can explore and experience nature, all from the comfort of their own homes.”

As of yet there is no confirmed release date for Hold the World. The development team have said that it should be available for Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift. There is currently no word on what the price point will be.

The new project ties in to other VR experiences that have allowed VR users to get up close with history, such as the British Museum’s Two Million Years of History and Humanity project, or the VR recreation of destroyed artefacts from the Mosul Museum.

VRFocus will continue to bring you updates on new VR projects.