The Nature Conservancy is launching a multi-year campaign called “This Is Our Future,” bringing together tech luminaries, artists and change agents to build a world where nature and people thrive. This new campaign features a series of Kickstarter-like campaigns to make immediate proven impacts on global threats to people and nature, and the tuna fishery in the western and central Pacific marks the first. Ambassadors for the campaign include Matt Idema from Facebook, engineer Tray Chao, Anthony Goldbloom from Kaggle and cultural influencer and artist Yosi Sergant.
The Conservancy, wanting to reach the tech community in a new way, partnered with MPC VR, a division of Academy Award-winning creative studio MPC, to create a VR experience that imparts understanding of the problem and the need for funding tech-enabled monitoring of the Pacific tuna fishery. The real-time interactive VR experience takes the viewer on a journey through huge scale gallery spaces where they can see the problems facing the fishery —e.g., depleting tuna stocks, killing vulnerable species like sharks and turtles—via a poetic and emotionally engaging series of scenes. Those sculptures communicate the story’s message through the viewers’ actions, a conversational voiceover by Kieran Culkin and directional sound design by award-winning music and sound design company Q Department.
Here’s a 360 online film version of the project (though the optimal viewing experience is on the Oculus Rift).
The “This Is Our Future” VR experience is making its debut at a Conservancy-hosted influencer event today (10/6) in San Francisco.
