Experience OBSEA: a web-based 3D virtual environment of a seafloor observatory

OCEANS 2023, 05-08 June 2023, Limerick.-- 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table.-- © 20XX IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksOceanographic data such as wave conditions (height, period, direction), wind, and sea currents are often difficult to interpret. What is the sea state given a certain wave height, wave directional spreading, and wind speed (e.g., 2 m, 29º, 18 m/s)? An expert user might be able to imagine the sea conditions with such information, but this will be almost impossible for a non-expert user. The common approach for visualizing oceanographic data and its variability is usually through tables and 2D graphs, for example plots, bar diagrams, and latitude-longitude maps. These visualizations are often limited to displaying raw data values, which still require user interpretation. With the purpose of providing a more intuitive view of the marine environment and sea conditions to a widespread audience, this work presents an experimental web application. The open-source application represents in a realistic and intuitive way the observations from a meteo-oceanographic and seafloor observatory located in the Western Mediterranean; the OBSEA observatory. The user can visualize the marine observatory facilities within a 3D virtual environment that changes and evolves according to the data acquired. This work aims at a digital twin of the seafloor observatory using near-real-time and historical dataThis work was financed by BlueNetCat, a project funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)With the institutional support of the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S)Peer reviewe