Global Health – A VR approach for building climate change awareness

Challenge: To foster the understanding of the consequences of one’s actions on climate change, low-threshold accessible and understandable content is needed. Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a valuable tool in the field of sustainable development education. However, there remains a lack of practical approaches and empirical insights into fostering climate change awareness through an eco-embodiment perspective. Thus, in our lecture Exergames, we in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Daniel Roth gave our students the challenge:

Develop a virtual reality solution that confronts users in an everyday life simulation with the consequences that may arise if the behavior shown in industrialised countries is calculated on the entire population of Earth.

Date: Winter semester 2022/2023

Lecture: Exergames

Result: 

Global Health – a VR approach for building climate change awareness

Team:
Jonathan Denzler, Florian Enders

Abstract: “The small things in life” is about showing people the impact of their everyday actions on the climate and thus planet Earth. We created a VR prototype that is set in a virtual apartment where the player has to complete everyday tasks like deciding on which groceries to buy or how to heat their apartment. Emissions of their decisions are tracked in the background and extrapolated over 50 years assuming every person on the planet would live like the player. At the end of the game, the player can see the impact they had on the planet and hopefully gain a new perspective on how their actions influence our climate.