Overview
My team and I set out to create a virtual reality (VR) experience focused on climate change in Miami, Florida. Since VR has shown to be an effective empathy building tool, we thought it would be powerful to really show the realities of climate change hitting close to home here in America. Miami was the city of choice as it is already slowly being flooded and just in a few decades could look drastically different. 

In addition to the above goal, we also explored how well a VR UX Design project could be implemented within a classroom setting.
Role
UX Designer, UX Researcher, Concept Artist

Tools
Blender

Duration
10 weeks

​Team
Irini Spyridakis, Caleb Park, Sarina Katznelson, Sam O'Brien
I presented my team's research paper based off of this project at the 2020 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference.

Research paper can be found here.

Research

Through our research we sought out .We interviewed two sustainability professors for general sustainability knowledge and to see what has been effective in their experience to get people more involved with stopping climate change. Additionally, we interviewed students with a varying degrees of climate change awareness. 
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Some common trends:
  • Numbness towards the reality of climate change from being oversaturated by messages from the media.
  • Visuals of climate change effects do leave an impact but often leave participant's feeling overwhelmed and with a feeling of general helplessness.
  • Participants want to help but do not know how.
  • Climate change effects generally has not directly impacted them in anyway.
  • Confirmation that focusing on an American city being affected by climate change would be a more impactful VR experience compared to just showing visuals effects from around the world.
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These were some of the points that led us to want to show the realities of how an American city might look in the future. However, we knew we would need to finish the experience on a positive, hopeful note with knowledge of what to do.

Ideation

During ideation, we each individually wrote up how we expected this experience to look, taking into account: interactions, music/sounds, lighting, and the 3D models we would need. Afterwards, we met up and sketched out some more ideas before combining it into one solid script.

Since this was a VR experience intended to bring awareness and make people motivated to make a difference regarding climate change, we tried to apply persuasive UX concepts into VR, in this case scarcity triggers and social proof.
miami_vr_detailed_story_line___script.pdf
File Size: 55 kb
File Type: pdf
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Storyboarding + Concept Art

Here we visualized our script by drawing out each screen and making it clear how we were going to guide the user through each scene.

Prototyping + Tool Learning

Once my team and I got past the storyboarding phase, we dived into the most difficult part for us, which was creating the experience we designed. Since we had limited time on the project, we opted to jump into creating a functioning prototype right away rather than experiment with prototyping techniques we found online.

Sarina and I worked on the artistic side by learning Blender while Sam and Caleb focused on Unity. While we did learn a lot, the tools proved challenging to learn, so we did not end up completing this project.

I managed to complete two concept art pieces and a Blender tutorial but I did not end up creating the building models as I had planned to originally. Thank you to Andrew Price for providing such fantastic Blender tutorials on Youtube!

Reflection

While we were not able to complete this project like we planned, working on it was very fun! I love taking on a new challenge and this was the first time I dived into creating a VR experience myself. It is an area I would love to work in and this project was a good stepping stone in that direction. Right now, I look forward to continuing my Blender modeling work.