Towards Eco-Embodiment: Virtual Reality for Building Climate Change Awareness within Education for Sustainable Development
: We simulate an ordinary everyday life in an industrialized country apartment. The users’ actions directly impact accumulating CO2 emission which trigger (projected to the entire earth’s population) threshold-based consequences.Abstract
To foster the understanding of the consequences of one’s actions on climate change, low-threshold accessible and understandable content is needed. Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a valuable tool in the field of sustainable development education. However, there remains a lack of practical approaches and empirical insights into fostering climate change awareness through an eco-embodiment perspective. Our prototype addresses this gap by immersing users in a VR experience that simulates an everyday life scenario. The player’s activities are calculated as if the entire population of Earth would exhibit such a behavior. At the end of the simulation, they are presented with the long-term scaled global consequences for the environment. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of this communication method but also reveals necessary gameplay optimizations toward longitudinal pre/post studies to quantify users’ learning and behavioral changes.