Bass Strait
Submarine
VR

Much of the infrastructure involved in offshore decommissioning sits far below the surface, somewhere almost nobody will ever see firsthand. Woodside needed to communicate what exists beneath the waterline: while the structures may have been decommissioned, to fully remove them would be to remove the habitats that marine life has built around them over decades.

The catch was the source material. There were no 3D scans, no site models and no photography shoot to draw on. All we had to work with was a handful of flat videos of underwater submersible footage.

The real challenge was turning that thin starting point into something people could actually be inside: an experience with genuine presence, built almost entirely from craft.

With so little reference to build from, the concept had to do the heavy lifting. A submarine voyage gave the experience its frame: a cockpit to sit inside, a reason to descend, and a natural way to guide what the user sees.

Marine life conservation became the lens. Framing the journey around the ecosystem that has grown across the structures gave the descent a story worth taking, and the perfect excuse to showcase the animals living on and around the steel.

From inside the cockpit, users descend through the water column to the lower steel piled jackets, experiencing their scale and complexity from a perspective otherwise reserved for specialist operations.

The lower reaches of these structures sit at depths beyond where humans can go. No dive or site visit can take an audience there, and photographs and diagrams flatten what is really below.

Virtual reality can go where people cannot. It carries users past the limits of human depth, lets them experience the structures at full scale and shows 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 realism lives in the layers. A fully realised cockpit surrounds the user, with navigation, depth, hull status and mapping information playing across the onboard displays as the vessel moves through the site.

Real voice-over guides the descent, giving the journey a human presence, while a crafted soundscape does the quiet work of conviction: the hum of the vessel and the muffled, pressurised acoustics that make you feel genuinely underwater.

Outside the glass, the steel structures emerge alongside the ecosystem growing over them, from fish and kelp to larger species moving through the water. Nothing about the experience betrays how little footage it was built from.

The experience gives stakeholders a way to genuinely understand what is at stake in decommissioning decisions. Seeing the reef that has formed across the steel piled jackets makes the case in a way no report or diagram can.

That understanding matters, because the ecosystems that have developed around these structures now depend on them. The experience communicates why retaining the jackets can be the most responsible path for the marine life that calls them home.

And it proves a point we love making: immersion is built from craft, not source material. A few flat videos became a place people can visit, and a habitat they can argue for.