Shark Week Swims into VR

Shark Week fans will be swimming with the fishes this year, as Discovery Channel is introducing a first-ever virtual reality (VR) experience to mark its summer event’s 28th year on air starting June 26.

The immersive component will be available via the DiscoveryVR app for Isle of Jaws, which explores a concentration of all-male great whites off an uncharted island near Australia.

“We’re really excited about the VR work,” says John Hoffman, the executive VP of documentaries and specials for Discovery Channel. “If you’re sitting at home and watching this linearly on TV, that’s just one viewing angle. But some entire acts [of the show] are shot for VR, so you can go online and have a VR experience along with what’s on the TV.”

Hoffman hopes the VR project will help further audience engagement with the annual stunt, which has for years embraced participation and interaction via social media.

“Between Facebook Live events and [Discovery’s digital shark hub] Sharkopedia, which have become such successes for us, we are leveraging every bit of social media that we can to feed people’s curiosity,” he says. “And the fact that we can feed that curiosity in so many ways beyond the linear experience is where all this began. All these platforms are just perfect vehicles for small bits of information that we can package for people about sharks.”

Other highlights for this year’s event include Air Jaws: Night Stalker, an in-depth look at how great whites hunt in the dark, narrated by Game of Thrones’s Lena Headey; Return of Monster Mako, in which state-of-the-art technology is used to document the live predation of a giant mako shark; and Tiger Beach, about the reproductive habits of the aggressive tiger sharks.

And for those who can’t get their fill of the ocean predators, Discovery is bringing back for the fourth year in a row the late-night talk show Shark After Dark, once again hosted by horror auteur Eli Roth.

“The fact that [Roth] wanted to do it again shows that he really loves these creatures,” Hoffman says. “He’s an über Shark Week fan and he’s funny. He understands storytelling, he understands how to create a bad guy and a demon and then try to work against people’s expectations, which is what Shark Week is doing: it’s taking these top predators and revealing their amazing ways and how they can be horrific and awe-inspiring at the same time.”

But it’s not just U.S. audiences that will be able to marvel at these underwater creatures—the shark programming will expand to all of Discovery’s more than 220 countries and territories, launching simultaneously for the first time on Discovery Channel and Discovery en Español in the U.S., as well as in Canada, the U.K. and Argentina. The worldwide rollout will continue in Norway in July and Mexico in August, with Australia, New Zealand and other markets down the road.

“Shark Week this year truly is a global brand,” Hoffman says. “It is more synchronized around the world than ever before, and we’re synchronizing our marketing. We’re trying to really have as many of our franchises that have international appeal synch things up because of the speed with which information flies around the world. We want to allow fans around the world to access this content whenever possible.”