Social Media

Celebrate World Oceans Day by Taking a Virtual Dive in theBlu


To help celebrate World Oceans Day on Friday, take an online dive in theBlu, a socially connected virtual ocean that's modeled on global waters from the Atlantic Ocean to the Baltic Sea.

TheBlu is one part social network, one part online game and a splash of oceanic activism. Users can explore an entire underwater world replete with thousands of the ocean's creatures by themselves or with Facebook friends. Every action a user takes while in theBlu's watery world has an impact somewhere else in the app's universe: a message that the ocean, while vast and mighty, is also sensitive to pollution and tampering.

Should a user encounter an aquatic species he or she likes, they can buy more of that species for their local waters. A portion of the proceeds collected from these transactions is donated directly to a conservation effort for that particular sea creature.

The app, according to its designers, is intended to be a metaphor for the Internet as a whole — a vast, interconnected place where users can interact with one another to explore and create beautiful things. It's also a platform for people to learn about the Earth's oceans and the importance of keeping them vibrant with life.

"The blue is about creating the ocean on the World Wide Web," Neville Spiteri, one of theBlu's founders, told Mashable. "A big part of theBlu is to raise awareness and celebrate this amazingly wonderful deep resource we have on this planet, the ocean."

SEE ALSO: All Star Animators Recreate the Entire Ocean Online

For World Oceans Day, theBlu is doing something very special. They're releasing a giant, beautifully animated Blue Whale into the environment for users across the world to follow as she migrates around the world. Conservationist groups OceanElders and WildAid are partnering with theBlu for the special event.

The idea? To create a globally shared connected moment built around the motif of oceanic conservation.

"If you think about experiences like the Olympics, they're a unique time where hundreds of millions of people feel like they're all connected sharing the same experience," said Spiteri. "With theBlu, we want to enable globally shared moments that can happen regularly online. And the big Blue Whale is the first one we're doing. She'll be released and will swim literally around the world across the Internet."

The whale, seen in the video above, was created by award-winning animator Andrew Jones, best known for his word on James Cameron's Avatar.

Ready to take a dip? Head over to theBlu's website to download the software, then come back and tell us what you thought about your deep-sea adventure in the comments below.

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