Bass Strait
Submarine
VR

Much of the infrastructure involved in offshore decommissioning sits far below the surface, making it difficult for most people to ever see or understand firsthand.

For Woodside, the challenge was to communicate what exists beneath the waterline — from the scale of the offshore structures themselves to the marine life that has developed around them over decades.

Traditional imagery can document these environments, but it cannot easily communicate what it feels like to be there.

We created a virtual submarine journey that transports users beneath the surface of Bass Strait and places them alongside the offshore platforms.

From inside the cockpit, users descend through the water column before approaching the lower steel piled jackets, revealing their scale and complexity from a perspective rarely experienced outside specialist operations.

The journey combines industrial infrastructure with the surrounding marine environment, allowing users to explore both as part of one continuous experience.

The size and location of offshore infrastructure can be difficult to understand when viewed through photographs, diagrams or screens.

Virtual reality allows users to experience these structures at full scale, move around them and understand their relationship to the surrounding seabed and marine environment.

By placing the user inside the submarine, complex technical information becomes part of an experience rather than something they simply observe from a distance.

The submarine cockpit becomes the user's interface to the environment.

Navigation, depth, hull status and mapping information are presented across a series of onboard displays as the user moves through the site.

Outside the cockpit, the experience reveals the steel structures alongside the rich marine ecosystem growing around them — from fish and kelp to larger species moving through the environment.

Together, the physical journey and supporting information help users understand both the infrastructure and the ecosystem surrounding it.

The experience makes a remote and highly specialised part of Bass Strait accessible to a much broader audience.

By combining accurate spatial representation, interactive exploration and environmental storytelling, VR provides a clearer understanding of what exists below the surface and the context surrounding offshore decommissioning.

Rather than explaining the environment from afar, the experience gives users the opportunity to go there for themselves.