Virtual Oil Spill (2014)

Vancouver non-profit useS virtual reality to make a disastrously possible future real today

We worked with the Dogwood Initiative, a Canadian sustainable land reform organization to address the ongoing concern of keeping oil tanker traffic away from Vancouver's coast. In November of 2014, we designed, developed and launched an experiential guerrilla futures intervention bringing to light what Vancouver's English Bay would look like after an oil spill.

It wasn't pretty — floating barrels, oil-soaked sand, fires in the water, a dead whale.

We worked with motion picture prop studio LairdFX to design a set of generic-looking sightseeing binoculars made to fit with an Oculus Rift DK2 virtual reality headset.

Our friends at Adrian Crook and Associates brought to life a realistic worst-case-scenario representation using the Unity game development engine and mapped the virtual experience to the environment at one-to-one proportions.

Timed to coincide weeks prior to the Vancouver mayoral election where oil pipeline construction approval was a hot-topic, we were successful in attracting many candidates along with the incumbent mayor along with regional and national media attention.