Step Inside the Thai Cave in Augmented Reality

Organization: The New York Times

Date: July 21, 2018

When a group of young boys and their soccer coach were rescued from the flooding labyrinth of the Tham Luang cave, we used Augmented Reality to visualize key points of their arduous journey. The spatial nature of AR made it an ideal medium to viscerally convey the physical and psychological challenges faced during the rescue mission.

Space and scale are best understood through the physical movement of one’s body. Using interviews with divers and data from a 1980’s cave survey, we created five silhouettes of the cave passage and placed them in our readers’ environment in true dimensions. To convey the claustrophobia and lack of visibility described by one of the rescue divers, we submerged our readers in darkness, making the cave outline the only window to the outside world.