Envisioning Corals: Project's aims

A project for people, driven by education and psychological strategies

Being climate change one of the major concerns that humanity needs to address, the necessity for an efficient and innovative way of communicating sustainable themes to the public has risen. Thus, Virtual Reality has been identified as a new form of communication in the field of environmental protection.
Virtual Reality allows users to directly experience the consequences of pollution and climate change thanks to its engaging, immersive, and visualizing properties. For this reason, we gathered a multidisciplinary team to create a Virtual Reality application to help users visualize the effects of coral bleaching phenomena and their impact on coral reefs and their inhabitants. That is, Envisioning Corals.

The Envisioning Corals application tackles the coral bleaching phenomenon through an innovative XR-based solution concurrently with behavioral science strategies. Our serious game has been conceived as participants can experience the impact of anthropogenic pollution and rising temperatures on a fragile and rarely accessible ecosystem. Users will be transported inside a virtual representation of a coral reef. They will be able to choose between three different avatars to impersonate: a coral, a hermit crab, and a sea turtle. Users will not be passive spectators but will be asked to actively imagine, participate, listen and act inside the reef.

Another fundamental aim of the Envisioning Corals project, involves not only sensibilizing users to the coral bleaching phenomenon but also involving classrooms, and educational settings. We aim at creating a scalable virtual environment that can be easily available as an innovative complementary teaching tool.