Strapping on an aviator helmet and grabbing the joystick on the aircraft control panel, Bishop Museum historian DeSoto Brown was a World War II fighter pilot on a mission to sink Japanese aircraft carriers in the blue waters off Midway Atoll.

Although this was July 2016, not June 1942, and his windshield was really the screen of a flight simulator, Brown and his onlookers were gripped by tension as he virtually veered through the sky, trying to target one of the long vessels on the ocean below as swarms of fighter planes buzzed around him.

“This is confusing. I can’t tell which planes are friendly,” said Brown. A fireball filled his screen. “Whoa! I just crashed.”

Brown was testing “The Battle of Midway,” a hands-on, experiential re-creation of the great naval battle that was the turning point of World War II in the Pacific. It is one of several interactive, virtual-reality displays in a new exhibit, “Journeys: Heritage of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands,” which opens today in Bishop Museum’s J.M. Long Gallery.

Midway Atoll is in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a chain of small islands, atolls and shallow reefs extending 1,300 miles northwest of the eight main Hawaiian Islands.

Designated as the Papaha­naumokuakea Marine National Monument and World Heritage Site in 2006, the far-flung archipelago has long been the stuff of myth and dreams.

“Journeys” combines the rare opportunity to view ancient cultural artifacts from the sacred isles of Nihoa and Mokumanamana with the entertaining chance to explore the region’s history, flora and fauna and recent scientific discoveries through new technology tools.

Most of us will probably never visit Papahanaumo­kuakea, given its remoteness, stark wild environment and protected status that restricts access to scientists and cultural practitioners. To help the public appreciate and enjoy this incomparable natural and cultural resource, the exhibit’s creators aim to take us there virtually through immersive activities, said Brad Evans, director of exhibits and production, who organized “Journeys” with exhibit designer Michael Wilson and the museum’s science and technology staff.

The exhibit began taking shape a year ago with the idea of introducing the public to Bishop Museum’s work as a research institution. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands were chosen as the theme “because it has been a focus point for all the different aspects of our research — historical, cultural, plants and animals — in the past 100 years,” Wilson said.

Last month, while the exhibit was still being assembled, Wilson and Evans and research staff offered the Honolulu Star-Advertiser a preview of its multifaceted elements.

Upstairs in the anthropology department, artifacts selected for display in “Journeys” invited quiet contemplation and wonder.

Dark stone kii — carved images — lay on their backs in two rows atop a white-covered table.

Silent and small yet powerfully built, these human forms were silent emissaries from an unknown era.

“It’s impossible to directly date them,” said Mara Mulrooney, an anthropologist and the museum’s director of cultural resources, of the stone figures.

The figures were brought to Hawaii in 1894 by an annexation party that had sailed to Necker Island, approximately 265 nautical miles beyond Kauai, to plant the U.S. flag, but they could have been made at any time after the first Polynesians from the South Pacific arrived in the main Hawaiian Islands from A.D. 1000 to 1100, Mulrooney said.

The kii were taken from ahu (altars) in heiau spread along the spine of the island, which was named Mokumanamana by the Hawaiians. Most are in Bishop Museum’s collection, but two are on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Peabody Museum in Boston.

In the 1920s ethnologist Kenneth Emory documented 41 heiau lying along the mountainous spine of Mokumanamana, Mulrooney said. “The entire island could be conceptualized as a shrine.”

She explained that Mokumanamana, which lies on the Tropic of Cancer, was viewed by the ancient Hawaiians as the interface between the realms of Au (light), inhabited by living beings, and Po (darkness), the land of the gods and the dead.

Kii are generally the images of ancestors, said Marques Hanalei Marzan, cultural resource specialist, but stone images were rare. As full-body forms made of stone, the Mokumanamana kii are “very unique, with no similarity to any other kii in Hawaii,” Marzan said.

Mokumanamana and Nihoa, the latter also called Bird Island and situated 100-odd miles closer to Kauai, “have been regarded as power sources in all moolelo (tales and myths), in the Kumulipo (Hawaiian creation chant) and the stories of Pele’s travels with her sisters,” Mulrooney said. “Archaeologists called them the mystery islands, because when Europeans found these sites, there were no people there. But they weren’t mysterious to the Hawaiians.”

Emory estimated that Nihoa, where residential and ceremonial ruins and agricultural terraces were found, could have supported a population of about 150 people, whereas Mokumanamana might have had a population of 30 to 40, all of them priests.

Queen Kaahumanu, who had been captivated by descriptions of Nihoa in legend and songs but didn’t know anyone who’d actually been there, organized an expedition to find the legendary island in 1822. The queen went along on the trip, and the island was found and annexed to the Hawaiian kingdom. In 1857 King Kamehameha IV visited Nihoa and formalized its annexation.

In 1885 then-Princess Liliuokalani sailed on an excursion to Nihoa in a party that included Sanford B. Dole, in the role of ornithologist. In 1893, when she was queen, Dole would be one of the revolutionaries who overthrew her government.

During the visit a fire broke out on the island, and everyone had to evacuate, only to have two of their boats capsize in rough seas. Despite these mishaps, Liliuokalani brought back to Hawaii an ancient stone bowl she had found on Nihoa that day. It is carved in an unusual square shape with high sides, and will be displayed along with other Nihoa stone vessels.

In 1892 Liliuokalani gave the bowl to Bishop Museum. “She was like a hanai sister to Bernice Pauahi Bishop,” Mulrooney said. (Bishop’s husband, Charles Reed Bishop, founded the museum in her honor after she died in 1884.)

While no longer inhabited by humans, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are densely populated by wildlife, including seabirds, turtles, endangered Hawaiian monk seals and species of fish endemic to Hawaii, meaning they exist only here, said Richard Pyle, a zoologist and associate researcher at the museum.

Comprising 139,797 square miles, Papahanaumokuakea is also the world’s third-largest marine protected area and the largest conservation area in the United States, bigger than all of the national parks combined. A proposal to expand the monument is currently being considered, and might be a topic of discussion at next month’s International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress in Honolulu.

Pyle, who is also the museum’s dive master, helped create interactive, virtual-reality displays that simulate diving in NWHI waters. Visitors will sit in a model submarine with portholes and goggles that provide a 360-degree experience of being submerged in a dark-blue underwater world.

While diving in NWHI in June, Pyle shot 3-D underwater videos with a GoPro 360 mounted with six cameras shooting in different directions. “Then you stitch the videos all together using Video Stitch,” he said, handing a reporter the prototype “omnidirectional goggles,” encased in a boxy frame. “They’ll give you the sense of looking through a submarine porthole.”

Looking through the 3-D goggles, the reporter startled as a Galapagos shark swooped out of the blue and tapped the lens with its nose. Sharks and other fish appeared to swim around and underneath the viewer.

“There’s a scene under the pier at Midway as well as footage of reef fish, many of them endemic (to Hawaii),” Pyle said.

His team has also discovered several new species in the NWHI. One of these, the orange-margin butterflyfish — “We’re still working on its scientific name,” Pyle said — will be formally announced as a new species at the end of the month. In September an aquarium with live orange-margin butterflyfish might be added to the “Journeys” exhibit.

The rate of endemism on shallow NWHI reefs is astonishingly high at 46 percent, Pyle added with excitement. “It’s a very special endemism, found nowhere else.”

In the main Hawaiian Islands, about 24 percent of reef fish are endemic; at Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the rate is about 23 percent. In Papahanaumokuakea, as reported in a study published last month, researchers discovered that “some reefs at 300-foot depths of Kure Atoll have 100 percent endemism.”

Watching the brightly colored fish and ghostly sharks ply the pristine, dark-blue waters of the refuge, one couldn’t help but wish for a virtual-reality simulator that could transport us to the world of the kii, in that interface between the realms of darkness, where ancestral spirits and the gods reside, and our world of light.

All we can use to get there now is our imagination, which, thanks to “Journeys,” should be well prepared for the voyage.