Bill’s Reals Blog - Scuba, Travel & Gadgets

I walking down the aisle and I saw a bunch of people standing around, so of course I stopped to see what was going on. The booth was showing a demo of a software product called DiveNav which is a scuba diving simulation “game” dubbed vDive. It was unique in the aspect that they mapped areas and you were virtually diving the topography of the area. In the demo, they were showing Casino Point on Catalina Island.

They were doing a survey and by participating in the survey you got a little holographic dive map of Casino Point. This represents the ONLY piece of swag that I picked up at this show.

Anyway, the product looks like a first person action shoot, Gears of War, Halo, and you see the world through your dive mask. You have gauges, can run out of air and you navigate underwater while swimming around. I found it boring and was struggling to see the market for it, alas this is what happens when you work in marketing. I realize that I’m not there target market but still I have an opinion.

The survey seemed like they had built a product and now where trying to figure out the market for it. That’s not a good sign in the software business where you can be obsolete in months. All the best to them, I hope they do well but I’m just more of a get-out-there-and-do-it kind of guy now and would rather go on a real dive.

Next up was the Ouroboros Rebreather, another UK company and a very high tech and high priced rebreather. The Ouroboros features a circular shaped scrubber which gives it a unique appearance. The use of this feature makes it look like the legendary US NAVY Mark 15 rebreather but this unit a lot more reliable and is CE certified.

The Ouroboros is made by the same folks who are involved with the Delta-P VR3 dive computer and this rebreather-friendly dive computer, is the integrated as the main monitoring handset. The unit features an L.E.D. based heads up display to notify the user of a problem. This one feature is very popular and is present on almost every rebreather at the show.

The unit is a little larger than AP Diving’s unit and these start at approx $17,000, depending on the exchange rate. This makes it the most expensive unit currently on the sport diving market.

By the way, Ouroboros is an ancient symbol meaning serpent or dragon.

I stopped by the Hydroptix Masks booth to see if there was anything new to see. I’ve seen these mask, read the reviews but never used one myself. The mask is curved, which expands the field of vision and allows a diver to see the correct size and distance underwater. The rub is that you have to be far-sighted to use it correctly. This is fine for those folks who are already far -sighted but for people with correct vision, you need to put contacts into your eyes to make you far sighted. I’m not a big fan of putting things into my eyes.

They had a water tank that you could stick your fact into and see the difference. Now, the thought of sticking my face into a huge tub of water where over a 100 people had done so before me, wasn’t appealing, but I suffer for my art.

I was able to see how the field of vision changed, it was blurry because I’m not far-sighted but it does expand the field of vision.

They have a hybrid mask coming out for folk who don’t want to deal with contacts but the mask is LARGE.

Deep Sea Supply is a boutique maker of technical diving equipment. Tobin George, the owner, is a passionate diver who has been working closely with DPV maker, Dive-Xtras, to make accessories for the X-Scooter.

He had a couple of new products. A slim, low profile “scooter BCD” for use in scooter-based free diving and what’s called “monkey diving” where you take as little equipment with you for speed.

He also has a nice stage tank rigging kit that seemed really slick.

I headed on over to Aquatica’s booth for more photo gear therapy. They had some new lens housings that now features glass instead of poly-carbonate, those are called Megadomes. I love that name.

Also, they were featuring their large magnification eye-piece, Aqua View, that fits most of the current Aquatica housings. These were pretty common sighting now, across most of the manufactures, and were available for most housings out there except for Ikelite, which of course, is the housings I own.

Aquatica’s aluminum housings are well built and good to a depth of 300 feet. I was told that they are developing a line of housings for the entry level DSLR cameras, which should be out later this year/early next year.

A new vendor was Calabasas based Bubblseekers Titan rebreather. At first glance, it looked like a leatherback turtle but that was only the protective fabric outer shell.

The compact and fully electronic Titan was design with easy of ownership/ maintenance and work of breathing. The rebreather is the size of the KISS but has the features of the AP Diving rebreathers. It has a fully integrated dive computer, which handles air/nitrox/trimix, the standard 3 oxygen sensors and is depth rated to 250 feet.

I stopped by Light and Motion’s booth to see what they had that was new. The new item was the Titan housing for the Nikon D200, it’s seriously made me consider ditching my trusty Canon 20D and throwing in with the Nikon crowd.

Since they are using the camera’s USB connector to control it, it allowed them to place the buttons and controls in a well thought out and logical order. It also features a large LCD that displays your current f-stop and aperture and the housing feature L&Ms integrated strobe control system, ROC.

They also showed off a Sony HC7 Bluefin video housing that features a touchscreen control which was very cool. I’m amazed at how small the prosumer HD video cameras are getting.

I will say that Paul Barnett was very cool and patient in walking me through the products they had on display.

I have an Ikelite housing and two DS-125 strobes, so I had to go over to Ikelite and see what was new. They had some new housings out for the entry level DSLRs, like the Nikon D-40, and were showing me the new control for the iTTL/eTTL strobes.

They are moving from a set of push buttons, to a dial system that speeds up selection and uses less real estate on the back of the housing.

Next up was KISS rebreathers. KISS stands for Keep It Simple Stupid and the design philosophy is a simple mechanical rebreather that travels easy. They have two models, the Classic KISS and the Sport KISS, both start at approx $5,000. The Classic KISS has a depth “limit” of 250 ft and the Sport is rated to 165 ft.

I like the design philosophy of these rebreathers, less automated features, built-in safety features and focusing on making them travel friendly. There main training partner, SSA, had blinged up a number of the sport models in interesting Hawaiian/tourist patterns.

They are well thought out, even if they are a little garage tech in appearance.

There were a bunch of rebreathers at this year’s Scuba Show. I would say that it was easily double compared to last year. Rebreathers are interesting to me for two reason, they are big time gadgets and they are for SCUBA diving, it was to geek out at them.

First, I went to Silent Divings Booth. Silent Diving, is the North American distributor for the UK-based AP Diving Ltd’s Inspiration and Evolution rebreathers. These rebreathers are known for their engineering design and build quality and one of small population of rebreathers on the market that have a CE rating.

These fully electronic rebreathers, with multiple redundant safety systems and backups are “future proofed” with user updatable software and modular replaceable hardware. They have integrated decompression computers and the units have been as deep as 850 ft. The rep, a very nice man, explained that you could event let the technicians in the UK diagnosis your rebreather over the internet.

The Inspiration and Evolution are the same rebreather with different maximum dive times based on the size of the unit and related scrubber capacity. Both units start at $9,000.