About the VirtualShip

VirtualShip is a collaborative project developed at Utrecht University in partnership with the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) to advance how oceanographic fieldwork can be taught, planned, and explored in a “digital ocean.”

Users are able to design expeditions anywhere in the global ocean, deploy virtual oceanographic instruments, and receive measurements as though they were collected during a real research expedition. In this way, VirtualShip addresses the growing challenges of limited ship access, high expedition costs, and environmental burdens all the while expanding access to near-authentic fieldwork experiences.

At the core of the project is the VirtualShip Python package, which simulates realistic instrument deployments, streaming environmental data directly from the EU's Copernicus Marine Data Store. Alongside the software, VirtualShip includes VR/360° shipboard immersive videos and educational materials that help bridge the gap between theory and real-world marine science practice.

VirtualShip serves multiple communities simultaneously: students attending marine science courses, educators designing engaging fieldwork-based teaching, researchers planning expeditions and/or testing deployment strategies, and developers (which may stem from any of the former three groups) or external contributors that help co-create these novel pedagogical & research tools.

The project has already been trialled and integrated into 8 teaching cycles at Utrecht University and is expanding through an NKO Scale-up grant for collaboration with Wageningen University, RU Groningen, TU Delft, and the University of Amsterdam.