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Artic ocean is one of the smallest and shallowest ocean in world. This is also the ocean that most of us want to explore especially those underwater enthusiasts like divers and biologists for further studies.

Recently a group of scientists, divers, and film-makers went into an expedition to the  fjords, sea ice and open waters near Svalbard for the Oceans series on BBC Two. According to BBC, "Svalbard is a group of islands in the Norwegian Arctic Ocean, at 74–81°N. Roughly 2,300 people – and about the same number of polar bears – live there. In summer, the sun never sets although the air temperature averages at best just 6°C."

Aboard a Norweigan Vessel, the team will provide information of wildlife and natural phenomena of the said ocean in interactive multimedia such as film and 360-degree panorama.

These engaging 360-degree snapshots of the Arctic Ocean features sea ice, underwater animals from walruses to planktons, polar ecosystem underwater and hopefully, some of the unrecorded species.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/oceans/360/behindthescenes/

The team

The 18-strong production team included world-class divers with many thousands of dives in their log books. Team leader, Paul Rose, was a base commander for the British Antarctic Survey. Expertise was on hand from marine biologist Tooni Mahto, maritime archaeologist Dr Lucy Blue and environmentalist Philippe Cousteau. They were able to call on the local knowledge of the crew who operated the ice breaking dive ship, the R/V Lance.

Summary: Oceans presenters make their first experimental dive with the innovative 360° panoramic video camera.

Description:

This video shows Lucy Blue and Philippe Cousteau setting up a film experiment using a revolutionary camera that captures continuous all-round video images.Once the camera was placed on the sea bed, it was operated remotely from the boat in an attempt to capture the behaviour of lionfish on film, undisturbed by divers. The lionfish is an invasive predator which is devastating local fish populations. It was anticipated that the filming would shed light on their highly successful hunting technique. In the event, the lionfish decided not to perform in front of cameras and proved elusive - hence no lionfish on the film. The team were, however, rewarded on other film shoots with sharks and seals (see clips on the right).

Camera:

The 360° panoramic video camera has 11 individual video lenses which record simultaneously. The lenses are housed in a "dodecahedral" camera head, encased in a waterproof plastic surround.

The camera is kept on the sea bed using dive weights and is permanently connected to the boat. A cable feeds images back to a viewing engine where the "blending" of all the camera image streams takes place in real time. Once this process is complete and the film is captured on a hard drive, stitching software creates "sphere movies" showing the whole environment in motion at once.

 

Reference: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/fromthefield/oceans/