OBLIVION

Data-driven VR Game on Climate Change

We explored ways of putting time in perspective to promote climate change awareness by leveraging temporal-spatial dimensions in VR. On this basis, we designed, tested, and developed a first-person perspective VR game, Oblivion, to demonstrate its potential to visualize real-world data in a new way, enabling users to see and feel the time on the climate clock.
YEAR
TEAM
TOOLS
METHODS
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MY part

May 2022 - July 2022
3
Unity, Maya, Figma
Playtesting, Semi-structured
Interview
game development, conducting user study
Problem
Raising awareness about climate change is a challenging task because individuals often fail to recognize or realize the immediate effects of climate change due to the psychological distance between the impacts of climate change and the human mind.
Research Question
‍How can we translate real-world data into an immersive experience to visualize temporal-spatial dimensions of climate change in VR?
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view Paper
Research
context / problem
design
game concept
Oblivion is disguised as an exploration game to keep the concept of the game secret for players to make sense of and create meaning of climate change at their own pace. The players are tasked with documenting the island’s experience by taking landscape pictures with a camera. During the last phase of the game, players discover the actual concept through the photo album - that the island is Tuvalu and that visible climate change effects have occurred throughout their stay on the island.
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User Experience journey
data-mapping
We utilized real-world climate data of Tuvalu, a sinking island nation in the Pacific Ocean for credibility. These data are then mapped to various visual elements of the game to create the temporal and spatial dimensions of climate change.
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development
USER INTERFACE
Traditional UI elements, such as buttons and menus may not be intuitive to use in the immersive VR environment. To tackle this problem is we created onboarding material that guides the users on how to use the hand controllers.
Additionally, throughout the UI designs, we placed clear visual cues to indicate how to interact with the UI and the 3D models, allowing the users to quickly understand and interact with the environment.
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Ending
Additionally, throughout the UI designs, we placed clear visual cues to indicate how to interact with the UI and the 3D models, allowing the users to quickly understand and interact with the environment.
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Usability Testing: Playtesting
The participants (n=5) were first introduced to the game and asked to think out loud while playing Oblivion1. After experiencing the game with a VR device, we conducted a semi-structured interview2 asking about their thoughts on the game concept and overall experience.
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Finding - GAME CONCEPT

All the players succeeded in completing daily missions. Most of the players spotted relatively apparent changes like the change in color of the sun and sea level rise. However, no one managed to identify all the visual elements of climate change on the island and link them to climate change in the gameplay experience. All players reflected on the changing climate through an explicit before and after comparison using the photo album, commenting that it was surprising, and connecting their time on the island with real-world climate change was thought-provoking.
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finding - GENERAL

Participants reported positive feedback on the visual and ambiance of the island3. In line with this, many participants suggested adding various features and interactions to enhance the experience, for example, allowing more functionalities on the camera. As some participants mentioned motion sickness, we consider implementing longer breaks between each day and providing alternative modes of locomotion such as teleportation to keep players as still as possible and minimize movement and acceleration.
Next steps
We aim to refine the current prototype according to user feedback:
  • Add more functionalities on the camera such as zoom in/out, selfie mode
  • Utilize more diverse climate data
  • Provide alternative modes of locomotion such as teleportation
Further research should be undertaken to address solid answers to the questions raised by this study:  
  • What is novel about VR in addressing the challenges of climate change awareness?
  • What are the uses and effects of affordances in VR games to visualize climate change?
  • What is the potential of VR as a persuasive medium to promote climate change awareness?
These important questions need to be addressed to build a more robust design rationale for making the game VR-based.
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Index
  1. We designed and developed a first-person perspective VR game to promote climate change awareness. Oblivion is developed using C# on the Unity3D platform (version 2021.3.5f1) with the Oculus Integration SDK (41.0) and runs on Oculus Quest 2.
  2. Semi-structured Interview for 20 minutes asking the following questions
  3. Especially being able to hear the ocean waves and see flying birds. They reported the overall exploration part as a visually pleasing and fun experience and felt a sense of presence while playing the game.
Jisu park @ 2024