According to Apple’s website, Apple Watch Ultra today welcomes the Oceanic+ App, turning Apple’s most rugged watch into a full-featured, easy-to-use dive computer. designed in partnership with Apple, Oceanic+ combines the Apple Watch Ultra’s new depth gauge and water temperature sensor, allowing recreational scuba divers to take their everyday watch to previously unattained depths – up to 40 meters. – up to 40 meters.
Apple says the Oceanic+ App on Apple Watch Ultra and the companion App for iPhone have all the key features of an advanced dive computer, providing dive planning and an all-encompassing post-dive experience.
In the 1950s, the first scuba divers were diving into the ocean and exploring the planet, some 30 years before dive computers were created. By the 1980s and 1990s, many licensed divers were still using pen and paper to create their own dive schedules. They used the Burman decompression algorithm to record their depth and time underwater, thus ensuring a safe dive on the ocean floor without overloading their bodies with nitrogen.
Now, Apple says, Apple Watch Ultra revolutionizes the diving experience by providing recreational divers with a more convenient device while offering users all the Apple Watch features they have long known and loved.
In the Oceanic+ App on Apple Watch Ultra, the home screen displays the diver’s current depth, decompression-free time, water temperature and other information.
In the dive planning tool, users can set information such as surface time, depth, and breathing gas, from which Oceanic+ calculates the user’s No Deco time – the limit of time a diver can stay at a given depth. The planning tool also brings together the latest information from the community on dive conditions, including tides, water temperature, and even visibility and currents. After a dive, data such as incoming and outgoing GPS location information and an overview of the user’s dive profile automatically appear on Apple Watch Ultra. The overview on the iPhone version of the Oceanic+ App provides additional information, including maps such as incoming and outgoing locations, as well as graphs of depth, temperature rise rate and decompression-free limits.
One of the most intuitive features of Oceanic+ for Apple Watch Ultra is the tactile feedback. This feature is a combination of hardware and software designed to allow the watch to touch the user’s wrist with different forms of vibration, allowing divers to receive timely notifications while underwater, even through a 7mm thick wetsuit.
While tactile feedback is inherently a convenient and simple feature in everyday life, underwater it has an even more unexpected effect: allowing important information to reverberate across the ocean floor and directly to the user’s wrist.
“Sound travels with much higher intensity in water than in air,” Silvestri describes, “So if I’m diving with other people and their dive computers make a sound, I’ll have a hard time telling whose device is actually ringing. All I could hear was a ticking sound, but I couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. With the Ultra’s tactile design, we’ve created a very personal experience. It’s like a gentle nudge that provides you with guidance.”
Huish Outdoors has been rigorously testing the Oceanic+ App at dive sites around the world in preparation for its release.
The Oceanic+ App also offers a number of sophisticated features that give users important information and tools at a glance, including no-fly times, surface time, quick access to dive planning tools, dive settings, current altitude, maximum altitude limit, and one-click quick access to the App. from planning a dive to first dive to return to the surface, users can track and compare all the details of each dive and share the experience with other divers directly through the App. Share your experience with other divers directly through the App.
The app’s dive planning tool provides detailed information on surface temperature, water temperature, wind, UV intensity and tides for up to three days ahead.
Oceanic+ App on Apple Watch Ultra shows post-dive log
The app is available for download from the App Store and requires an Apple Watch Ultra running watchOS 9.1 or later paired with an iPhone 8 or later running iOS 16.1 or later. The app’s basic plan is free and includes many common dive features, including depth, time and recent dive history. For $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year, users can get decompression tracking, tissue loading, unlimited log capacity and more
Apple says to always follow the dive protocol, dive with a buddy and have an assistive device.
