Yuba Island — Red Sea

NEOM wanted more than footage. Film shows you a reef; it doesn't let you experience it.

The brief was a digital twin that could serve two masters at once an emotional, explorable experience for visitors who may never dive, and a measurement-grade scientific instrument for the teams protecting the reef itself.

The challenge of capture belonged to the dive team: six months of operations by BDML, five to ten thousand images aligned every day, across 437 hectares of living reef. The challenge of making all of that usable belonged to us.

A dataset of this scale — 29 photogrammetric tile sets, each with roughly 600 million polygons — disrupts conventional content workflows. The LXR platform provided the production backbone: centralised asset storage and management for every submodel, texture set and species asset, versioned as the capture team's daily output flowed in from the Red Sea, and a CI/CD pipeline that automatically built, tested and deployed experience updates across both the CAVE and desktop targets. Software-grade continuous delivery, applied to an ocean.

Rebuilding the Ocean

The paradox of underwater photogrammetry is that capture removes the water — the murk, the caustics, the shifting light — to get clean geometry. LXR's Unreal Engine build restored the ocean. Physically-informed light absorption and scattering restored authentic depth visibility; time-of-day systems and surface dynamics made the environment feel alive; and a night-dive mode recreated torch-lit conditions, calibrated against real 5500 K dive-lamp footage from the site itself.

A Reef That Behaves Like a Reef

Over 100 locally documented species were integrated as simulated populations, each governed by 45 behavioural parameters — schooling styles, swimming speeds, habitat and depth preferences, flight distances, and reactions to approaching viewers. Whitetip sharks patrol where the real ones patrol; dolphins cross the southern ridges as they do in life. An interactive fish library turns the simulation into an educational tool.

The flagship experience is a room-scale CAVE — an immersive projection environment inside NEOM Sport where the reef surrounds visitors at true scale. Deploying it meant taking the Unreal build from a single screen to a synchronised multi-projector system, delivered through the LXR Spatial Platform: frame-locked rendering across every surface, blended and warped to the physical room, commissioned and calibrated on site.

Navigation was its own design problem — visitors are not gamers, and an ocean has no floor to walk on. We developed a custom motion-control scheme for the space: guests fly the reef via a handheld console, with compass and depth readouts on display, or sit back for a guided experience — movement dynamics tuned for comfort inside a fully surrounding projection. Getting that tuning right is the difference between a demo people endure and an experience they queue for.

Alongside the CAVE, the desktop twin — served from the same platform — gives researchers and planners measurement-grade access to every coral head. The same world, serving science.

Beyond the Experience

Because the twin is georeferenced and scientifically rigorous, it works as infrastructure, not just spectacle. Multi-year datasets already support coral-growth measurement and document the 2024 bleaching event and its recovery; the survey even revealed a submerged late-Roman heritage site now under investigation. The work is published in the peer-reviewed ISPRS Archives — and the same pipeline extends to archaeology, offshore infrastructure, habitat monitoring and dive training.