Deep-Sea V.R.-ing

Underwater relics belong both to history and to our unconscious dream life, beckoning with an eerie mystique from the graveyard of the deep, their secrets buried with them. Technological advances have finally made these ruins accessible to explorers. The sunken Titanic, resting and rusting off the coast of Newfoundland, is the most fabled deep-sea landmark, but there are others rich with lore scattered around the oceanic globe, and you don’t need a submersible to visit them. Now, thanks to the prodigious efforts of Malta’s Virtual Underwater Museum and teams of archaeologists, divers, and photogrammetry specialists, any landlubber can slip on a pair of V.R. goggles or move a cursor across the screen to explore the spooky remains of a Phoenician shipwreck, an American B-24 Liberator bomber, a British submarine, a German torpedo boat, and a plucky little biplane known as the Fairey Swordfish—neat! Educational too. Each site is lavishly annotated with capsule histories and vintage photos: World War II buffs in particular will plotz. I may finally spring for a V.R. headset if only to go glub, glub into the deep. —James Wolcott

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