Specialists at Magellan, a deep-sea mapping company, piloted a pair of submersibles for six weeks, employing sonar equipment and videocameras to create a virtual twin of the massive ship and the area three miles around it, including debris from the wreck. The sonar images alone, taken during 200 hours of surveying, numbered more than 715,000. The result is very, very fine detail, such that viewers can zoom in and appreciate tiny details in the 3D model, such as clear views of individual rivets and even the serial number on the propeller. Experts hope that such availability will address many of the still unanswered questions about the last hours in the life of the giant ship.

The Titanic is now 12,500 below the surface, after sinking as the result of a collision with an iceberg on the evening of April 14, 1912, claiming the lives of more than 1,500 of the 2,220 people onboard.

The Titanic was one of three Olympic-class ocean liners built by the White Star Line in the early 20th Century. The ship's designers, paid well by the White Star Line, went out of their way to tell the world that the construction was safe and sound for the voyage across the northern Atlantic Ocean, from Southampton, England, to New York. The designers were so convinced of the infallibility of their design that they included only 20 lifeboats, enough for one-third of the people onboard to vacate the ship if necessary. As it turned out, many more were needed.

On September 1, 1985, a team of French and American explorers discovered the wreck. One of the team was Dr. Robert Ballard, a famed underwater explorer who returned the following year in the one-man submersible Alvin and gained further evidence of what happened when the boat sank. The many explorations that followed have shed some light on what happened, but the ship is so large and so far down that seafloor shadows have so far prevented further understanding. The new photorealistic images change that.