I Am Kelp

Become kelp through real-time body tracking and protect the ecosystem.

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What if you could become part of an underwater forest?

Step into a kelp forest and let your body become part of its movement.

Raise your arms, shift your weight and sway with the current. I Am Kelp transforms your movements into those of kelp flowing through the water. As you move, the forest moves with you.

Life within this forest depends on balance. As otters disappear, the urchin population increases causing the kelp to disappear and the wider ecosystem changes with it. When conditions shift again, the forest has a chance to recover.

I Am Kelp places you within these changes. Through your own movement, feel how pressure on one species can spread across an underwater community and how the relationships within an ecosystem shape its recovery.

Move with the forest and feel its balance shift around you.

Lewis Kimaru and Ram Murugan first joined OceanX through the OceanX Young Explorers Program. They developed the idea with the OceanX Changemakers Community during a hackathon aboard R/V OceanXplorer, then continued working across continents as Ocean Futures Fellows to bring I Am Kelp to life. The project was supported by OceanX scientists, educators and collaborators across marine biology and immersive technology.

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Lewis Kimaru
Designer-engineer from Nairobi and founder and project lead at Seamo, an ocean intelligence platform using computer vision to help marine scientists identify species from underwater images: upload an image, get back annotated labels, making expert identification accessible to anyone. This work has earned him two Earthshot Prize nominations and led him to address the UN on marine innovation. He is an Ocean Futures Fellow focusing on immersive media, exploring how he can use his skills as a designer who builds to create experiences that not only educate but invite people to interact with ocean research and stories. He believes the future of ocean conservation lies in the experiences we create, ones that transform data into wonder and turn observers into advocates.
Muralidhara Ram Murugan
Ram grew up on the coast of Johor and has spent most of his life around the ocean, which is probably why he ended up studying marine biology at Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. Coming from Southeast Asia, the heart of the Coral Triangle, he's watched some of the world's most biodiverse reefs up close and noticed how little technology has actually reached the people trying to protect them. That gap pushed him to ask harder questions about reef health, and eventually led him to found ReefSpark, an AI-powered coral monitoring platform that fuses field science with machine learning. He won the OceanX Science Impact Challenge after progressing through the Young Explorers Programme, and went on to serve as Immersive Media Generalist during the OceanX Futures Fellowship, where he got to explore what it looks like when ocean science meets storytelling and immersive technology. That experience stuck. Today his work lives at the intersection of SCUBA fieldwork, AI integrated 3D reef modelling, and XR, and he genuinely believes that the best shot we have at protecting reefs is making them impossible to ignore: visible, measurable, and felt.

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