Project Eyes on the Seas - Ending Illegal Fishing Using Gaming Tech

I work for the Satellite Applications Catapult in the UK and we have been working on a project with Pew Charitable Trusts with the goal of building a system to use satellite derived data to track and deter illegal fishing at sea. Around one in five fish sold today is illegally caught so it's a certainly a big problem to tackle. We have a live feed of vessel positions using satellite AIS (Automatic Identification System) combined with a few other data sources to create a near real-time and historical view of fishing activity around the world.

We're using the Unity games engine for data visualisation and as the interface to the system, both on our video wall and desktop machines, and we have a tablet version in the works. The video wall runs at 11536x3252 and Unity runs a treat!

We've in the region of 130,000 vessels tracked at any point in time, all of which are rendered and animated on the screen at an accelerated rate for analysis. We are building the system using MMOs as inspiration as we've all seen how it's possible to organise and work in a large group of people in raids to achieve a common goal. Having analysts working globally with large sets of data, it seemed a good model of interaction to follow.



A screenshot is too large pixelwise to upload it seems so a link to full scale version can be found here;
http://www.neave-eng.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ops-room-screenshot.jpg

A video showing the video wall and the software in action, along with more information on the project, can be found here;
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/multimedia/video/2015/project-eyes-on-the-seas

We're considering doing a live presentation of the system in a few weeks using Twitch or similar, if anyone would be interested in a demo or if you've any thoughts or comments please feel free too leave them below.

Regards,
Keegan Neave

 

Certainly an impressive use of Unity.

 

I thought that was pretty cool and tweeted about it!

 

Thanks guys, glad to hear we aren't barking up the wrong tree.

 

Very Cool !
By the design and the cause behind it..
Well done

Can I ask what did you use to draw all the lines on screen ? Vectrosity?

 

Good eyes, it is indeed Vectrosity! Perfect solution for us, easy to implement too.

 

This is very exciting to see. Real world applications beyond gaming for Unity. Even more so, its for a great cause.
Most definitely not barking up the wrong tree, this is very cool. Could be a spark for somewhat of a movement within the Unity-verse.