Life in the Great Barrier Reef opens at the WA Maritime Museum in Fremantle today, putting visitors inside a 360-degree virtual reality dive across the world’s largest coral reef system. The 8K footage was captured on custom underwater camera systems built by Perth company White Spark Pictures, and the documentary reaches places most people will never see in person.
The VR experience takes viewers beneath the surface of the Great Barrier Reef and through the wet tropics of Queensland’s rainforest. It’s the only place on Earth where two UNESCO World Heritage sites sit side by side. The production surfaces reef environments and animal behaviour that have seldom been filmed, and highlights both the wonder and fragility of the reef, inspiring visitors to support its protection for generations to come.
“Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see up close these remote rarely seen reef environments,” Creative Industries Minister Simone McGurk said. “This project demonstrates how Western Australian innovation is helping to tell significant environmental stories using advanced technology developed right here in our State.”
Life in the Great Barrier Reef is the second film in a partnership between the Western Australian Museum, the National Museum of Australia, and Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, which together established a fund to support a series of new VR productions.
The first, The Great Kimberley Wilderness, launched across WA Museum sites in 2024, narrated by Luke Hemsworth and was built on its Surround Sync platform that lets hundreds of headsets run in sync inside a single cinema. It went on to sell out multiple seasons and returned to the Maritime Museum for an encore earlier this year.
The studio behind Life in the Great Barrier Reef, White Spark Pictures, was founded in Perth in 2017 by director Briege Whitehead, and the reef film follows earlier VR documentaries The Antarctica Experience and Beyond the Milky Way, each built around taking audiences places they are unlikely to ever stand themselves.
When and where
Life in the Great Barrier Reef runs at the WA Maritime Museum at Victoria Quay in Fremantle from Saturday, June 27th, until Sunday, November 8th, 2026.
