A new online virtual reality experience will bring you face-to-face with one of the world's most famous shipwreck dive sites: the British freighter SS Thistlegorm, sunk in 1941 by German bombers near the mouth of the Gulf of Suez at the northern end of the Red Sea. Face to face.In 1941, German bombers sank the ship near the mouth of the Gulf of Suez at the northern end of the Red Sea. At the time,
the World War II merchant ship was carrying hundreds of tons of Allied war materiel - including tanks, train engines, trucks and motorcycles - to Alexandria, Egypt. Jon Henderson, a marine archaeologist at the University of Nottingham in Britain, said:
Since the 1990s, the Thistle has become one of the world's most famous wreck dive sites for its spectacular sunken cargo. Hundreds of people dive the site every day, he said. [Dive a World War II-era shipwreck with 3D virtual reality images]
Henderson is the coordinator of the Thistlegorm project, a virtual reality tour of the shipwreck that was posted online Oct. 6, just 76 years after German bombers sank the vessel.
Jon Henderson, a marine archaeologist, used a 360-degree underwater camera into the water above the Thistle Leaf wreck in the Red Sea. (Thistlegorm Project)
The online experience combines a highly detailed 3D model of the wreck, based on thousands of photographs, with 360-degree underwater video in which divers are exploring key parts of the wreck.
Henderson told Live Science that only divers can see most of the world's underwater sites directly. But with virtual reality technology, the wider public can now experience shipwrecks.
"There are about 6 million divers in the world, so less than 0.1% of the world's population has access to these sites," he saidBut we now have the technology where we can reconstruct them in photo-realistic detail, and we can now create models that people can explore and interact with on their phones or at home.
Sunken treasureA team university of divers and archaeologists from the University of Nottingham and the University of Alexandria in Egypt spent five days moored to the Thistlewood wreck west of the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, about 18 miles (30 kilometers) offshore from the Egyptian dive resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
Simon Brown, the team's photogrammetry specialist, made 12 dives to the Thistlewood wreck during that time, Henderson said, totaling **** more than 13 hours underwater. During those dives, Brown collected thousands of photographs with a conventional Nikon camera fitted with a 6mm fisheye lens. The camera and two flashes were mounted on an underwater scooter so Brown could cover more ground during the dives.
Simon Brown, an underwater photogrammetry specialist, spent more than 13 hours underwater taking photos of the shipwreck model. (Thistlegorm Project)Brown later processed and combined the shipwreck images with photogrammetric software that extracts three-dimensional data from a set of two-dimensional photos.
The result was a highly detailed three-dimensional modeling of the wreck based on the 24,307 largest photogrammetric images Henderson said the survey of a shipwreck measuring about 7 acres (28,300 square meters) showed that
While Brown was taking photographs for the 3D model, Henderson was focused on documenting 360-degree video of key points of the wreck.
Henderson said he was inspired to apply the technology to the wreck after seeing 360-degree underwater video of the reef at a conference earlier this year He said, "I just thought, 'This would be amazing on a shipwreck,' because to me, 360-degree video is the closest you can get to actually diving," he said
A detailed 3-D model of the massive wreck is the result of larg