Envisioning Climate: A Virtual Reality Workshop

“The year is 2100. The world is now an average of 4°C warmer, and, as climate refugees flee the searing heat of places like Southern Europe, which has temperatures akin to those in 21st-century Sub-Saharan Africa, armed conflict over increasingly limited resources is ever-present. Even in areas like Great Britain that enjoy somewhat cooler temperatures akin to the Middle East of 2015, the impact of ferocious cyclones, intensified by the much warmer ocean threatens places, such as Scotland, which never saw such storms. Sea-level rise has entirely consumed low-lying areas like the Maldives; they are now completely underwater. Summer heat and aridity have loosened topsoil, making it vulnerable to erosion by increasingly severe winter rainfall, rendering the land both infertile and, in many cases, uninhabitable across the U.K. and the rest of the great middle swath of our world. Farther south, desertification and drought continue their ongoing march over once fertile agricultural lands in Spain and Portugal.” (2100: A Dystopian Utopia – The City After Climate Change)

Is this the future we want? No? Well, it’s not too late to change course.

How can we mobilize to change the future for the better? Climate change unquestionably represents the biggest challenge to the continued presence of humankind—or any other species—on this planet. Managing and attempting to limit the effects of global warming should be our biggest project, prompting us to marshal our collective will, energy, and creativity to design a livable solution to the inevitable shifts in weather and habitat.

Urgent timelines alone, however, are not enough to prompt action. This workshop aimed to make the invisible visible and tangible by harnessing virtual reality as an empathy machine. Taking inspiration from VR artists and creatives like Participant Media and Condition One (This Is Climate Change), Marshmallow Laser Feast (In the Eyes of the Animal, Ocean of Air), Winslow Porter and Milica Zec (Tree), Tamiko Thiel (Evolution of Fish, Unexpected Growth), the Yale University Hackathon (The Reality of Global Climate Change), among others, we brought to life the latest climate data on New York’s potential future(s) in VR with the aim of creating immersive experiences that can spur us to positive change in the here and now.

“The immersive and engaging nature of virtual reality has been used to help tackle the impact of climate change and motivate and inspire us to solve the climate crisis. Filmmakers and advocacy groups have turned to the medium as a tool for building empathy and driving action. Research has shown that using virtual reality to engage and change behavior works. Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab found that if a person has a VR experience of cutting down a tree—during which they feel the vibration and sound of the chainsaw and the crash of the tree—that person is more likely to conserve paper.”
Sol Rogers in Forbes, Could Virtual Reality Make Us Care More About Climate Change? (November 2019)

“Studies show that VR experiences influence behavior and decision-making. Consider  one study  that gave participants avatars resembling aged versions of themselves. When interacting as their older avatars, participants were more likely to sacrifice immediate financial rewards for long-term benefits. Researchers concluded this experience opened up cognitive channels that increased real-world interest in saving for retirement.  Another study gave participants VR avatars of differing heights and asked them to participate in negotiation exercises. Those with taller avatars behaved more confidently and negotiated more aggressively … The experience often triggers emotions as if you were physically there. In fact, the same mirror neurons fire when we perform an action ourselves as when we observe someone else perform the same action. This makes VR experiences a powerful way to build empathy…”
Artefact Group, VR Changes How We Think. Now What?