Earthgazing in VR

Description

Overview effect is a profound experience that space travellers have when they see the Earth from outer space and feel overwhelmed by its vastness and beauty. This experience is categorized by a profound sense of awe and a cognitive shift towards realization of the interconnectedness of all the living species and a renewed sense of responsibility for the future of our shared home planet. This experience has positive impact of wellbeing, and pro-social and pro-environmental behaviour.

This project ask whether we could provide people on Earth a glimpse of the Overview effect via immersive technologies. I have analyzed interviews with astronauts and existing research on overview effect to derive design and evaluation guidelines that can be used to design and evaluate overview effect elicited in VR.

My role

I took the lead on the conceptual development of this project, while VR designs have been implemented by my collaborators.

Collaborators

Denise Quesnel

Bernhard Riecke

Publications

Stepanova, E. R., Quesnel, D. & Riecke, B. E. Space-a Virtual Frontier: How to Design and Evaluate a Virtual Reality Experience of the Overview Effect. Frontiers in Digital Humanities 6, 1–22 (2019).

Stepanova, E. R., Quesnel, D. & Riecke, B. E. Understanding AWE: How a virtual journey can lead to increased connectedness. Frontiers in Digital Humanities (2019).

Quesnel, D., Stepanova, E. R., Aguilar, I., Pennefather, P. & Riecke, B. E. Creating AWE: Artistic and Scientific Practices in Research-Based Design for Exploring a Profound Immersive Installation in 2018 IEEE Games, Entertainment, Media Conference (GEM) (2018), 200–207.

Tags

Funding

“How can we use immer­sive VR to give people piv­otal pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences with­out having to send them out into space?”

Stepanova E.R