Deep Sea VR 360 Camera Team Wins $20,000 Award To Film World’s Largest Squid

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On December 13, 2018, Conservation X Labs awarded Real Deep Conservation VR the $20,000 Con X Tech Grand Prize for their development of a 360-degree, virtual reality camera designed for conservation monitoring of the deep sea. 
 
 
Person unloading deep sea machinery from boat

 

To secure the prize, the team deployed a camera named ACKBAR (Autonomous Camera for Kraken Baiting and Recording)—to depths reaching over 2,000 feet. In all, they recorded eight hours of high-quality footage and encountered a variety of sea life: chimaera, squid, shrimp, sea stars, siphonophores, jellies, lanternfish, and hagfish. The deep sea is one of the most uncharted and endangered places on Earth. Because of this, ocean depths are highly vulnerable to exploitation and disturbance. From bottom-trawling nets to oil spills and new deep sea mining on hydrothermal vents, Real Deep Conservation VR developed the ACKBAR camera as a low-cost response to such threats to the deep sea. 

 

 
“The deep is alive, mostly unexplored, and worthy of protection,” said Matt Mulrennan, CEO of Kolossal, a nonprofit intending to use ACKBAR in a conservation expedition to film the colossal squid in the deep-sea for the first time, the largest invertebrate in the world, comparable to the mythic Kraken. Currently, they are seeking research vessels headed to Antarctica, to conduct the mission. 

“This prize was amazingly important for us to develop an easy-to-use camera platform that could disrupt the outrageous costs of deep-sea research. Now we want to use it to find real, living sea monsters and protect them.”

 

 

The $20,000 Con X Tech Grand Prize is awarded by Conservation X Lab, and is a global conservation technology prototyping competition. Conservation X Labs’ mission is to apply technology, entrepreneurship, and open innovation to source, develop, and scale critical solutions to the underlying drivers of human-induced extinction. 

“Deep sea technologies are finally matching up to our level of curiosity,” said Mulrennan. “Honestly, it’s the most exciting time in history for ocean exploration.” 
 
Learn more about Kolossal here, and the official Con X Tech Prize.