Forget you’re chained to your desk and enter the forest in Virtual Reality.
When was the last time you took a walk in the woods? If you’re anything like me, it was long enough ago that you can’t remember. A sad reality of modern urban living and the corporate grind is that many of us are starved of nature in our daily lives, despite the fact that the United States alone contains around 750 million acres of forests.
But now you can simulate escaping to a real forest and basking in the tranquility of the trees, right from your desk. The Virtual Forest is a projected launched earlier this month by Koen Hufkens, an ecologist at Harvard University’s Richardson Lab, which broadcasts a live feed of continuously refreshing, 360-degree still images (one every 15 minutes) from a spot deep in the middle of the Harvard Forest, a plot of land in Western Massachusetts that is owned by the university and open to researchers and the public.
The feed is year-round, allowing you to check back in at anytime (well—anytime the sun is up, there is no night vision mode at present) to see what the trees are up to.
Using a desktop web browser, you can click and drag around the feed to see different angles of the woods from a height of about 5 feet (1.5 meters), the height of the consumer-grade Ricoh Theta S 360-degree camera that Hufkens installed on a post out there.
But the real magic comes if you view the Virtual Forest through a recent-model smartphone (iPhone or Android, just one that has a built-in gyroscope) and Google Cardboard, the company’s cheap, smartphone-powered VR headset design. Then you can actually feel like you’re standing right there in the forest, which is one of Hufkens’ goals with the project.
“I hope it can show people how the forest changes throughout the seasons…and the beauty of e forest,” Hufkens told Motherboard over the phone. “For people who are geographically isolated from the forest, I hope it provides a way for [them] to experience it up close and personal, compared to a standard photo.”
As a kind of demo reel, Hufkens created a timelapse of 360-degree imagery captured over just one day in Harvard Forest and uploaded it to YouTube
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Source: Motherboard