Envisioning Corals: Theoretical Background

Goal 13 of the 2030 UN’s Agenda for Sustainable Development aims to promote actions, at all levels, to fight climate change. In this regard, new methodologies and approaches to addressing this problem have been undertaken in recent years. Virtual Reality has been identified as an innovative form of communication, with encouraging results also emerging in a variety of areas. In the educational field, numerous VR applications have been developed for educational purposes in both STEM (e.g., biology, physics, mathematics) (Kumar et al., 2021; Dede et al., 1996; Ou et al., 2021) and more humanistic disciplines (Villena Taranilla et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2021; De Paolis et al., 2009; Häkkilä et al., 2019). These virtual environments are conceived as complementary teaching tools to support didactic aims (Wu et al., 2020), through interactive lessons, innovative ways of visualization, and reproductions of phenomena that are difficult to witness.

A particularly suitable topic for this type of teaching is climate change and its implications for sustainability. Thanks to the potential offered by Virtual Reality, it is now possible to visualize the impact of these phenomena in remote and difficult-to-access areas (e.g., the seabed) (Markowitz et al., 2018), making visible those changes that are invisible to the naked eye (e.g., CO2 concentration, acidification of water) (Fauville et al., 2021) and direct the user’s attention to their behaviours and habits (e.g., showing their carbon footprint) (Nim et al., 2016).

Gathering a multidisciplinary team with competencies in behavioral sciences, engineering and marine sciences, we relied on educational and psychological theories to develop an innovative and scientifically validated mean of support for climate change dissemination.