Movement in Virtual Time: How Virtual Reality Can Support Long-Term Thinking

The immersive nature of virtual reality (VR) allows even complex information to be communicated in an engaging, interactive, and fast way. This is particularly useful in the case of long-term political processes, such as the siting, construction, and management of a repository for high-level radioactive waste (HLRW). In this paper, we present an approach to convey an understanding of such long-time horizons by converting the information into a motion-controlled VR application. To gain insight into how users experience a period of 500 years, a pilot study with 15 subjects was conducted. The first results were positive; the subjects were thrilled with the presentation format in VR and offered several recommendations for improvement of the time visualization. For inexperienced users, the interaction was possible without any assistance and has the potential to be adapted to other use cases.