Sir David Attenborough is a world-renowed nature documentarian, mostly due to his ability to bring viewers into the moment with expert narration. Mix that with a virtual reality visual, and you’ve got an astoundingly good dinosaur encounter that anyone can experience at home.
Attenborough stars in a four-minute VR video showcasing the largest dinosaur we know to have walked the Earth—a Titanosaur, discovered three years ago in Patagonia. It’s 37 meters long and weighs 70 tons, but the numbers don’t really compare to seeing the video for yourself. If you’re running Chrome, you can fire up the 360-degree video in a browser, but it’s best if you can strap Cardboard VR display to your face to get the full experience.
The video is a mixed-reality project, meaning it’s shot partially with footage from a RED Dragon camera, and partly a CGI rendering. (To render the final 4K image took one computer 108 days, which says something about the quality.) In any case, it’s definitely worth watching—both because it’s a showcase of where television documentaries are going, but also because dinosaurs are cool as hell.
[YouTube]