In this real-time interactive VR experience you travel through the underwater world of the Californian coast.

Hitch a ride with inhabitants ranging from whales to squid, come face to face with inquisitive otters and territorial garibaldi and experience life at a microscopic scale, before diving into the ocean abyss to hunt with the mighty Sperm Whale. On the way you can explore and discover side-stories and new animals to build an understanding of the behaviours and relationships which sustain this diverse ecosystem.

Meticulously researched and crafted, our ambition has been to translate the DNA of our storytelling craft loved by audiences all over the world to an exciting new medium, to provide an innovative format and experience that brings VR to a wider audience and allows them to experience and learn about the natural world.

Life in VR - California Coast is an evolutionary step in natural history storytelling, utilising a new medium to tell new stories never before possible.

Working closely with Google engineers, this experience pushes at the boundaries of what is possible on the Daydream platform to deliver a rich and dynamic visual environment, complete with authentic animals and behaviours. Moving the user from being a passive viewer to an active participant, Life in VR puts the user directly into the world where animals react to their presence and exhibit behaviours unique to them and their situation.

Some of the innovative techniques include:

A real-time behaviour system allowing the animals to be aware and respond to the player and one another, as well as move dynamically based on their respective positions.

A dynamic and spatialised sound and music system allowing users to maintain emotional resonance and relevance to what is being experienced.

An optimised scenery collision system created with Voxel data of the terrain to accommodate the players’ six degrees of freedom.

Highly optimised realtime custom batching of kelp and geometry instancing to seamlessly swap in and out individual physics-enabled branches when players or animals collide with areas.

A highly customisable light baking system used to define bake maps per zone in order to reduce draw calls, balancing fidelity with performance on mobile devices.

A GPU instancing technique to bring 16,000 krill to life in a reactive and swarming experience.

A vertical and depth texture lookup fog to give the impression of light and dust diffused throughout the underwater atmosphere.

Life in VR - California Coast has been designed for the Daydream Lenovo Mirage Solo and represents the first generation of titles capitalising on the six degrees of freedom, allowing users to move forwards and backwards for a heightened sense of presence.