Critical Distance

The Southern Resident orcas of the Salish Sea are in crisis. Their food supply is dwindling, and noise pollution is dramatically affecting their world.

Critical Distance, a social augmented reality (AR) experience, brings audiences into the world of the Southern Resident Orcas. Seen through the eyes of Kiki – a five-year-old orca who carries the fate of her pod on her shoulders – Critical Distance tells the story of Kiki and her J pod, a group of 22 endangered orcas, who venture through and survive in the Salish Sea. Built in Unity, this ground-breaking social AR experience empowers audiences to ‘see sound’ and experience Kiki’s world of echolocation – and how human activity disrupts it.

Features include: 

• Shared interaction. The experience is shared by all members of the group.
• Hand tracking. The headset tracks hand movement and position, allowing audience interaction with J Pod.
• Hand tracking and shared interaction. Audiences become empowered participants throughout the experience and more than passive observers. They gain a sense of agency in the narrative and stakes in the outcomes when device-led hand tracking allows them to see their individual virtual influence on the experience.
• Seamless synchronized multiplayer. AR objects appear in all headsets in a shared digital environment. This allows audiences to feel that the characters are genuinely with them throughout the experience. To achieve this, Vision3 developed a custom server platform to launch the experience simultaneously on all headsets for each session. 

AR provides the perfect solution to ‘see’ the impossible – the Salish Sea through the eyes of the Southern Resident J Pod, in Echolocation. The audience remains aware of their real-world surroundings and fellow guests – but can also viscerally witness how extreme sound pollution directly changes what is visible or not. Critical Distance is a shared experience, that provokes sharing and group interaction throughout

To complete the experience, a custom-designed projection environment was created to surround audiences with the feeling of being below the surface of the Salish Sea. As audiences line up pre-experience, they are even able to see themselves in echolocation. The Microsoft Azure Kinect motion capture system is able to present the audience in true scale on the external projection system in live animation as echolocation, further allowing audiences to better understand the principles before the experience.