Grassroots September 2016, Vol. 16, No. 3 | Page 13

Article

Can Virtual Reality emerge as a tool for conservation?

N

Heather Millar

Freelance writer, San Francisco

ew advances in technology are sparking
efforts to use virtual reality to help people
gain
a
deeper
appreciation
of
environmental challenges. VR experiences,
researchers say, can be especially useful in
conveying key issues that are slow to develop, such
as climate change and extinction.
Could virtual reality (VR) — immersive digital
experiences that mimic reality — save the
environment?
Well, that may be a bit of a stretch. But
researchers say that it could perhaps promote better
understanding of nature and give people empathetic
insight into environmental challenges.
“Virtual reality can give everyone, regardless of
where they live, the kind of experience needed to
generate the urgency required to prevent
environmental calamity,” says Jeremy Bailenson,
professor of communication at Stanford University.
Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab
(VHIL) this year released a short VR documentary
and an interactive VR game that seek to explain the
issue of ocean acidification, the process by which
excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dissolves
in the ocean, making it more acidic and less healthy
for ocean life.
As Bailenson notes, “One of the greatest
challenges to staving off irrevocable climate
change isn't simply getting buy-in from skeptical
politicians – it’s getting people to visualize how
driving a gas-guzzling car or living in an energy
inefficient home is contributing to a problem that
may only manifest itself completely in future
decades.”
The lab’s documentary and game were presented
at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. Phenomena
such as ocean acidification are difficult to illustrate
because they happen in slow motion. Video from
the documentary has been adapted to be included in
Google Expeditions, a VR educational program
that’s still in beta, but has already been shown to
one million school kids around the world and will
soon be released to many more.
“Google Expeditions will be the means to reach
the student for whom the textbook or the lecture

Grassroots

isn’t working,” explains James Leonard, a program
manager on the Google for Education team. “It’s a
totally different medium. It’s powerful and superengaging. It will bring students closer to places
they otherwise wouldn’t be able to visit.”
So far, the Google/Stanford effort seems to be
one of the few aimed specifically at environmental
education. Predictably, a lot of early VR
investment is going into entertainment applications:
VR movies and games.
The nature documentary filmmaker David
Attenborough has just produced a VR experience
of a dive in the Great Barrier Reef. While meant to
entertain, that project will no doubt educate as well.
In more academic and policy settings, VR is
beginning to be used mostly to create 3D
representations of pollution or other human impacts
on wild areas.
Many environmental issues are complex and
difficult to explain fully. Phenomena like climate
change, ocean acidification, extinction, and glacier
erosion are especially challenging to illustrate,
either because they’re happening in slow motion or
because they’re evolving in remote places that few
people see, or both.
Virtual reality solves many of these problems,
Bailenson says. With the proper software, video
feed and VR headset, just about anyone might be
able to experience environmental change in the
Amazon, the Arctic, or even under the ocean.
When I take my ocean acidification dive, I jump
off from Palo Alto, California.
One minute, I’m in a high tech virtual reality
(VR) lab at Stanford University, standing on a
“haptic” floor of aeronautic aluminium that can
move and vibrate to simulate the feeling of
movement, encircled by speakers that can immerse
me in sound, and by cameras that can track my
every move, where I look, how and where I turn
my body.
The next minute, I put on the VR headset and
suddenly I’m in Italy, near the northern end of the
Gulf of Naples, on a jetty that extends from a
volcanic island called Ischia. To say it looks and
feels idyllic would be an understatement: The sun

September 2016

Vol 16 No. 3