Research about vection (illusory self-motion) has investigated a wide range of sensory cues and employed various methods and equipment, including use of virtual reality (VR). However, there is ...currently no research in the field of vection on the impact of floating in water while experiencing VR. Aquatic immersion presents a new and interesting method to potentially enhance vection by reducing conflicting sensory information that is usually experienced when standing or sitting on a stable surface. This study compares vection, visually induced motion sickness, and presence among participants experiencing VR while standing on the ground or floating in water. Results show that vection was significantly enhanced for the participants in the Water condition, whose judgments of self-displacement were larger than those of participants in the Ground condition. No differences in visually induced motion sickness or presence were found between conditions. We discuss the implication of this new type of VR experience for the fields of VR and vection while also discussing future research questions that emerge from our findings.
In this article, 61 high-school students learned about ocean acidification through a virtual laboratory followed by a virtual lecture and an asynchronous discussion with a marine scientist on an ...online platform: VoiceThread. This study focuses on the students' development of ocean literacy when prompted to ask questions to the scientist. The students' questions were thematically analysed to assess (1) the kind of reasoning that can be discerned as premises of the students' questions and (2) what possibilities for enhancing ocean literacy emerge in this instructional activity. The results show how interacting with a scientist gives the students an entry point to the world of natural sciences with its complexity, uncertainty and choices that go beyond the idealised form in which natural sciences often are presented in school. This activity offers an affordable way of bringing marine science to school by providing extensive expertise from a marine scientist. Students get a chance to mobilise their pre-existing knowledge in the field of marine science. The holistic expertise of the marine scientist allows students to explore and reason around a very wide range of ideas and aspect of natural sciences that goes beyond the range offered by the school settings.
Climate change impacts are felt globally, and the impacts are increasing in severity and intensity. Developing new interventions to encourage behaviors that address climate change is crucial. This ...pre-registered field study investigated how the design of a virtual reality (VR) experience about ocean acidification could impact participants’ learning, behavior, and perceptions about climate change through the manipulation of the experience message framing, the sex of voice-over and the pace of the experience, and the amount of participants’ body movement. The study was run in 17 locations such as museums, aquariums, and arcades in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Denmark. The amount of body movement was a causal mechanism, eliciting higher feelings of self-efficacy while hindering learning. Moreover, linking the VR narrative about ocean acidification linguistically to climate change impaired learning compared to a message framing that did not make the connection. As participants learned more about the experience, they perceived the risks associated with ocean acidification as higher, and they were more likely to engage in pro-climate behavior. The results shed light on the mechanisms behind how VR can teach about ocean acidification and influence climate change behavior.
Since the degradation of the marine environment is strongly linked to human activities, having citizens who appreciate the ocean's influence on them and their influence on the ocean is important. ...Research has shown that citizens have a limited understanding of the ocean and it is this lack of ocean literacy that needs to change. This study maps the European landscape of barriers to teaching 12–19 year olds about the ocean, through the application of Collective Intelligence, a facilitation and problem solving methodology. The paper presents a meta-analysis of the 657 barriers to teaching about the ocean, highlighting how these barriers are interconnected and influence one another in a European Influence Map. The influence map shows 8 themes: Awareness and Perceived knowledge; Policies and Strategies; Engagement, formal education sector; the Ocean itself; Collaboration; Connections between humans and the ocean and the Blue Economy, having the greatest influence and impact on marine education. “Awareness and Perceived knowledge” in Stage 1, exerts the highest level of overall influence in teaching 12–19 year olds about the ocean. This map and study serves as a roadmap for policy makers to implement mobilisation actions that could mitigate the barriers to teaching about the ocean. Examples of such actions include free marine education learning resources such as e-books, virtual laboratories or hands-on experiments. Thus, supporting educators in taking on the challenge of helping our youth realise that the ocean supports life on Earth is essential for education, the marine and human well-being.
•Collective Intelligence shows barriers to teaching 12–19 year-olds about the ocean.•Education stakeholder consultations ran in eight European countries.•European influence map represents the relationships among barriers.•Barriers in “Awareness and perceived knowledge” theme are the most influential.•Resources, courses and networks are options that can be used to address barriers.
As coastal communities around the globe contend with the impacts of climate change including coastal hazards such as sea level rise and more frequent coastal storms, educating stakeholders and the ...general public has become essential in order to adapt to and mitigate these risks. Communicating SLR and other coastal risks is not a simple task. First, SLR is a phenomenon that is abstract as it is physically distant from many people; second, the rise of the sea is a slow and temporally distant process which makes this issue psychologically distant from our everyday life. Virtual reality (VR) simulations may offer a way to overcome some of these challenges, enabling users to learn key principles related to climate change and coastal risks in an immersive, interactive, and safe learning environment. This article first presents the literature on environmental issues communication and engagement; second, it introduces VR technology evolution and expands the discussion on VR application for environmental literacy. We then provide an account of how three coastal communities have used VR experiences developed by multidisciplinary teams—including residents—to support communication and community outreach focused on SLR and discuss their implications.
The Ocean Literacy movement began in the U.S. in the early 2000s, and has recently become an international effort. The focus on marine environmental issues and marine education is increasing, and yet ...it has been difficult to show progress of the ocean literacy movement, in part, because no widely adopted measurement tool exists. The International Ocean Literacy Survey (IOLS) aims to serve as a community-based measurement tool that allows the comparison of levels of ocean knowledge across time and location. The IOLS has already been subjected to two rounds of field testing. The results from the second testing, presented in this paper, provide evidence that the IOLS is psychometrically valid and reliable, and has a single factor structure across 17 languages and 24 countries. The analyses have also guided the construction of a third improved version that will be further tested in 2018.
Video-conferencing use has increased significantly in recent years, highlighting the need to understand its impact on individuals' psychological experiences. We conducted two large survey studies ...(total N = 3920) to examine the relationship between video-conferencing, video-conference fatigue (Zoom fatigue), and individuals' feelings of social connection, social skills, and life satisfaction. Study 1 showed that people tended to feel more connected to others when video-conference meetings were frequent, brief and conducted with small groups, compared to long meetings with many participants. As meetings became longer and more frequent, people felt less socially connected and reported increased video-conference fatigue. Feeling cognitively or emotionally exhausted from engaging in video-conferencing may limit the ability to meaningfully engage with others in the call. In Study 2, mediation analyses indicated that increased video-conferencing could undermine life satisfaction by increasing video-conference fatigue. Furthermore, we compared participants’ perceptions of their social skills between in-person and video-conferencing meetings, and found people consistently felt less skilled in video-conferences than during in-person meetings. We discuss these findings in the context of widespread remote work and the need to protect well-being in this digital era.
•Frequent, interactive, small-group brief video-conference meetings increased how connected people felt to others.•As Meetings became longer and more frequent, people became less socially connected because they developed Zoom fatigue.•In terms of social skills, people felt less skilled in video-conferences than during in-person meetings.•Video-conferencing had adverse effects on well-being because of Zoom fatigue.
Ocean Acidification (OA) is an emerging environmental issue that is still largely unknown to the public and in its infancy in terms of educational strategies. OA teaching material should address the ...specific challenges that educators face while building learners' understanding of OA. The objective of this study is two-fold. First, we identified the barriers to teaching OA as experienced by formal and informal marine educators. Second, we provided educators an opportunity to experience virtual reality and discuss how it could serve as a tool for face-to-face and distance learning to address the identified challenges. The findings shed light on four overarching themes of challenges to teaching OA: lack of science literacy, unprepared education field, complex and invisible nature of OA and lack of personal connection with the ocean. Marine educators consider empowerment, perspective-taking and visualization as the three principal avenues through which virtual reality may contribute to mitigating the challenges to teaching OA.
This article provides an exploratory inquiry into children’s use of educational virtual reality (VR) at home, thereby complementing prior experimental research about the effects of VR on children. In ...order to assess the potentially innovative role that VR can play in remote instruction, this study collected data from parents and legal guardians reporting on their children’s VR use at home during the first wave of the shelter-in-place measures resulting from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. From April to July 2020, parents and legal guardians who own VR devices participated in a survey (n = 311), longitudinal follow-up surveys (n = 60), and in-depth interviews (n = 20). The results indicate how VR can function as an innovative tool for socioemotional learning in a situation of remote instruction by (a) enhancing school materials and (b) sparking conversations about current affairs. Additionally, the results highlight two main barriers obstructing children’s learning with VR. First, VR technology is gendered and may hinder the usage of both women and girls. Second, educational content is hard to find and lacks contextualizing complementary materials. With regard to the first barrier, the authors argue that the gender issue should be addressed in order to make VR more accessible to all children. This article addresses the second barrier by providing a database of educational VR applications. Ultimately, educational VR applications should be complemented with contextualizing materials to reach VR’s potential as an innovative learning tool.
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