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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: VR, AI and Climate Change [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-15

I’ve been conducting research on AI, virtual reality, and Climate Change and came across a series of YouTube videos that chronicle how virtual reality is being used to teach people about climate change.

From a paper Increasing awareness of climate change with immersive virtual reality, the authors explain why people are not innately inspired into action to address climate change:

… climate change is a relatively abstract phenomenon, in the sense that the effects of greenhouse gas emissions are not immediately visible but take place over many years (temporal distance), and the consequences do not necessarily occur at the same place as the causing behavior (spatial distance). Temporal and spatial distance can - at least partially - explain why it is so hard to bring this issue into awareness to the extent that it changes behavior in a sustainable manner (Trope and Liberman, 2010). Using traditional media such as films or illustrated brochures can be used to explain the mechanisms of climate change and visualize its consequences. However, providing an immersive realistic experience of the consequences of climate change may have additional psychological effects that increase environmental awareness...

Their study found that virtual reality experienced increased environmental awareness for those who were in the VR group but not so much for those in control groups that watched films, viewed pictures or read articles.

In particular, immersive VR can be used to visualize effects of climate change that can otherwise not be experienced directly due to large time spans (e.g., glacier melting) in a realistic way. Thus, the immersive experience can impact both the cognitive and affective processing of climate change. At the cognitive level, it might help users to establish a mental representation of the mechanisms that underlie climate change and its consequences. This, in turn, may raise the awareness of the risks associated with climate change (Ahn S. J. et al., 2014a; Kim, 2020). At the affective level, it can enhance the sense of being related and emotionally connected to the environment, thus making climate change a personally relevant matter (Akerlof et al., 2013; Ahn S. J. et al., 2014a).

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/15/2174885/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-VR-AI-and-Climate-Change

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