Thistlegorm Project: 360-degree online VR tour of British WWII shipwreck

In 1941, German bombers had sunk the British freighter SS Thistlegorm, an armed Merchant Navy ship, near the Gulf of Suez at the Red Sea's northern end.

At that time, the ship was carrying hundreds of tons of war supplies for the Allies, including tanks, trucks, train engines, motorcycles, etc. to Egypt's Alexandria.

The Thistlegorm became a famous shipwreck-diving site in the 1990s.

Thistlegorm Project's Coordinator Jon Henderson is a Marine Archaeologist at the UK's University of Nottingham.

Henderson said until now only divers could explore underwater heritage sites. He added there are around six million divers in the world, less than 0.1% of the world's total population.

He said with VR, the wider public can get access to the shipwrecks and other underwater sites.

Several researchers, including some from the University of Nottingham and Egypt's Alexandria University, worked on the virtual experience project.

For collecting pictures to develop a 3D model of the shipwreck, a team of divers and marine archeologists spent five days mooring over the shipwreck site.

The team made 12 dives and spent more than 13 hours underwater to gather thousands of high-quality pictures.

The researchers processed the collected images of the Thistlegorm shipwreck and combined them using photogrammetric software that extracts 3D data from 2D photograph sets.

After the process, they were left with a "highly detailed 3D model" of the giant Thistlegorm shipwreck, based on as many as 24,307 photographs.

It is the largest photogrammetric survey of a shipwreck so far, covering 28,300 square meters.