CF Adventure

Carbon Footprint Adventure

Sep, 2019 - Nov, 2019, 1 semester VR development project

Environmental Education | Climate Change | VR Storytelling | Oculus

Introduction

Climate change is a serious issue in modern society, and although many people are aware of the problem, there is a "knowledge-action gap" regarding this issue.(Ahn, Bailenson & Park, 2014) Although 64% of the teens believed that could take actions to make a difference in climate change, only 16% have recycled, 14% have limited driving, 8% used less plastic, and 6% have reduced energy use.

To give middle school students an immersive experience to promote pro-environmental behavior as they feel empathy toward species impacted by climate change (like polar bears), CF Adventure helps learning and constructing values on climate change.

My Role

As a VR developer in this project, I cooperate with my teammates and participated in all the process.


    Main Tasks
  • Designed an educational environmental VR game for middle school students
  • Programmed and Implemented VR game in Unity with Oculus Rift

    • Tools

    Unity

    Oculus Rift

    Teammates

    Chieh-An Tsai

    Darian Gleghorn

    Debbie Chen

    Eunhye (Grace) Ko

    Deliverable Results

    CF Adventure VR Game

    VR Development Process

    Story Flow and Development

    Crisis Creation
    Sea level change and negative consequence on the bears

    Presence
    Self-presence: Design of mirror on Arctic glaciers can scaffold users to build self-presence
    Social-presence: Interaction with animals(e.g. penguin) can have social-presence, which enhance empathy and adoption of pro-environmental behaviors for teenagers sensitive to social interaction.
    Environmental-presence: The Arctic glaciers scene and the surrounding animals can give students environmental-presence

    Factual Knowledge(Videos)
    Inform the players about the general consequences of climate change

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    Result

    Demo Video

    Testing and Playing

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    Project Reflection and Further Consideration

    Using virtual reality to teach middle school students about environmental education is an idea I really like. The immersive nature of virtual reality can provide students with a sense of empathy they did not have in the past and might motivate them to make a change in their behavior.

    Our goal for the future is to get a chance to conduct some experiments on students and receive feedback on them. Furthermore, the Polar Bear is just one example of what we are covering in Carbon Footprint Adventure now. There are many related topics to climate change we can incorporate into our work.