Parth Patel (VI), Sia Ghatak (VI), Sophia Guild (V), Ethan Geppel (V), Nora Jacobs (V), Som Ghatak (IV), Sarah Yu (IV)
Project Summary
Our IRT aims to construct a virtual experience for students to heighten their environmental literacy and increase their likelihood of being more cognizant of actions that negatively contribute to air pollution. We chose VR because of its unique capability to visualize distant, future, or typically invisible consequences in a personal and impactful way. After discerning the subject of our simulation, we discussed the project with Stanford Postdoctoral Fellow Anna Carolina Muller Queiroz, who streamlined our outline for the steps, duration, and specifics of VR development and experiment processes through explanations of cognitive psychology, the balance between interaction and narration, and the importance of experience personalization. We consequently mapped out our storyline, drawing from our conversation with Dr. Quieroz and our ongoing literature review. We carefully constructed narration to guide our subjects purposefully through our experience, which we are creating through Unity. We are both finding pre-existing software and making our own custom models in Blender, allowing us to add novelty to our simulation through a model of our school. We are simultaneously writing a paper on the possible usages and effects of virtual reality on communities, which is pending publication in Digital Society. In the future, we plan on testing our simulation with users to measure their self-reported change in environment awareness after our virtual experience and in comparison to a control of simply reading a book or listening to a lecture. By analyzing our results and refining our project, we aim to effectively minimize the disjunction between ourselves and our environment.
Project Goals
This year,
- Create a game that is immersive and convincing to influence change in a positive way towards climate change.
- Write a research paper about VR and its effect on people.
- The goal for this year is to create a working prototype for the game so that people can test run and try it.
As a team, we have a multitude of goals we aspire to achieve in the future. We plan to finish a game that is equal parts immersive and persuasive, and that is effectively able to create a positive impact towards the issue of Climate Change. Additionally, we plan to complete a research paper about Virtual Reality and its ability to impact the lives and minds of people. The goal for this project that we believe can be achieved just this year is to complete a functional prototype for the game, and to have members of the Pingry community test them to help us “troubleshoot”. Further in the future, we’d like to run a pilot study using our simulation to see whether it can change the mindsets of our classmates and teachers, and how it compares to more traditional educational methods.
Works Cited
Fauville, G., Queiroz, A. C., & Bailenson, J. N. (2020). Virtual reality as a promising tool to promote climate change awareness. Technology and Health, 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-816958-2.00005-8
Faculty Advisor
Dr. Mirliss and Mr. Steinberg
