In Visible Climate Change: Exploring Immersive Data Visualisation to Promote Climate Change Awareness in a VR Game

Abstract

Time is key to understanding climate change. In this paper, we explore ways of putting time in perspective to promote climate change awareness by leveraging temporal-spatial dimensions in VR. On this basis, we designed, tested, and developed a Virtual Reality(VR) game, Oblivion, to demonstrate its potential to visualise what is invisible, enabling users to see and feel the time on the climate clock. Building on existing work on VR data visualisation and serious game regarding climate change, this study investigates how to translate real-world data into an immersive experience of climate change. With our ongoing work, we aim to investigate the impact of immersive visualisation of climate data on the user’s perception and understanding of climate change. The findings can contribute to discussing affordances and strategies for utilising VR as a persuasive medium to enhance climate change awareness.