Department of Parks and Wildlife Western Australia delivers a 360°, 3d immersive experience showcasing destinations and places of interest in Western Australia, through Virtual Reality. All you need is a VR headset, such as Gear VR, Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard, and then download the VR app and get set to take an immersive journey around Western Australia.

Advancements in VR technology enable Department of Parks and Wildlife Western Australia to provide a virtual guided tour of our national parks and special places in Western Australia through Virtual Reality in true 3D stereoscopic vision. See the rugged south coast and hear the roar of the Southern Ocean, walk in the tree tops at the Valley of Giants and go underground in caves of the Leeuwin Naturaliste National Park.

Viewport travelled 10 days throughout Western Australia capturing spectacular raw 3D images to be used in the VR app. Travelling from Perth all the way down the Cape Naturaliste Coast, through Pemberton, Denmark and Albany. Capturing over fifty 360 degree 3D panoramas incorporating high quality stereo ambient audio recordings. Now full to the brim with breath taking scenery from regional and coastal WA, we returned to Perth and were ready to process all the images and audio files into VR ready content.

During the second stage of production for the Department of Parks and Wildlife we had to develop a number of in house solutions to turn our captured content into something that could be used on a virtual reality headset. As pioneers of 3D stereoscopic imagery for virtual reality in Australia, Viewport developed everything from the camera rig that captures the 3D imagery, to the manual post production pipeline to turn the images into high quality stereoscopic 3D images. After a month of post production and user interface development, the app was ready to move towards launching across on multiple platforms and devices such as iOS / Android for Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift and Gear VR.

At the final stage of production we developed a system of deploying DLC (Downloadable Content) that kept the app size small while maintaining a high quality VR experience. The users of the Department of Parks and Wildlife Western Australia app would be able to download the 360 3D content one image at a time using a high speed server.

Phase 2 of the Department of Parks and Wildlife Western Australia  project will start production in 2017 with many more locations captured in Virtual Reality around Western Australia to be added. Facebook integration will also be included as well as the introduction of 3D stereoscopic video.