An Explore of Virtual Reality for Awareness of the Climate Change Crisis: A Simulation of Sea Level Rise

TL;DR

This paper presents a virtual reality application designed to educate users about climate change by simulating local scenery and sea level rise projections until 2100, aiming to enhance awareness through immersive experience.

Contribution

It introduces a VR-based educational tool for climate change awareness that visualizes sea level rise projections and discusses ongoing efforts to adapt it to augmented reality.

Findings

VR enhances educational engagement on climate issues

System successfully visualizes local sea level rise scenarios

Work in progress to evaluate system effectiveness

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has been shown to achieve remarkable results in multiple fields. Due to the nature of the immersive medium of Virtual Reality it logically follows that it can be used as a high-quality educational tool as it offers potentially a higher bandwidth than other mediums such as text, pictures and videos. This short paper illustrates the development of a climate change educational awareness application for virtual reality to simulate virtual scenes of local scenery and sea level rising until 2100 using prediction data. The paper also reports on the current in progress work of porting the system to Augmented Reality (AR) and future work to evaluate the system.