The Open Ocean Initiative is taking a highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary approach to tackle existing and future challenges in ocean exploration and storytelling through technological innovation, scientific discovery, and community connections. Our vision is to create a new paradigm for ocean exploration by employing collaborative, innovative research methods across a spectrum of cutting-edge tools, and making ocean discovery accessible to all communities around the world to make significantly more progress in understanding our planet than ever before.
As such, numerous Open Ocean projects have taken a co-design approach, such as My Deep Sea, My Backyard, Maka Niu, and Ocean AI. The following report synthesizes feedback from partners and users from a broad swath of the marine community on two concepts and projects initiated by the Open Ocean Initiative at the MIT Media Lab in the spring of 2020, specifically (1) low-cost sensors & platforms for deep sea exploration and research, and (2) AI-driven underwater video analysis.