During the 1930s, researchers from Duke University were attracted to Pivers Island and its surrounding abundance of marine life. By 1938 the first buildings were erected, with the boathouse representing one of the first three structures created around a central academic quad. In 2015, researchers from the Duke Marine Lab recieved a grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a state-of-the-art research and education facility focused on the use of drones in marine science and conservation. This is the HQ for the MaRRS lab.

The Duke Marine Laboratory operates year-round to provide educational, training, and research opportunities to about 3,500 persons annually, including undergraduate, graduate and professional students enrolled in the university’s academic programs; visiting student groups who use the laboratory’s facilities; and scientists who come from North America and abroad to conduct their own research.

The Coastal and Ocean Visualization Environment (COVE) is located in the tallest building at the Duke Marine Lab – the Bookhout Research Laboratory. The COVE was established to provide an immersive visualization environment for researchers working with spatially explicit data and video content, including remote sensing imagery (from drone and satellite) as well as animal movement data, bioacoustic data, and a variety of video streams (HD, 4K, 360 degree).

The COVE has two workstation systems (12+ core AMD Ryzen CPUs), Nvidia RTX GPUs) driving a 170 inch Samsung video wall. The COVE also has a state-of-the-art video recording/streaming workstation and two Linux-based workstations (as above) running a variety of machine learning applications (e.g. AIDE, SLEAP).

The COVE is also outfitted with a Garrard Synchro-Lab fully automatic turntable (built in 1967) driven by a ART DJ III phono preamp and Pyle Home Mini 60W amplifier for spinning good tunes while cranking on data.