Full presentation outline:

LEFT WALL

EcoVision is a sustainability + VR project that encourages sustainable behavior change by making the long-term impacts of individual actions tangible and positively framed

The main problem this project tackles is how students don't change their habits because they believe one person's actions won't make a difference. We talked to over 10 individuals during our needfinding process:

From educators we heard:

• Climate concepts is hard to understand when it’s not personal and immediate
• It’s hard to visualize scale

From students we heard:

• Even though most students want to be more sustainable, they usually don’t know where to start, so convenience usually takes over

From both educators and students:

• They highlighted how it’s important to have positive reminders of being sustainable, rather than guilt tripping methods

So what we wanted to tackle was “How might we encourage individual habits by positively and tangibly visualizing long-term impacts?”

We first tested people’s perceptions of consumption; we learned that there’s a really big misunderstanding specifically on water consumption

We also did low-fi prototyping in Sims to asses what type of interactions users liked, which was gamification, control, and autonomy features (individual action), and also an IRL impact visualization to test the user journey and flow. Users liked the tangibility aspect.

BACK WALL

Ultimately, this is how we came up with our final experience — we aimed to leverage VR capabilities for visualization and immersion to make the impact of individual habits more tangible

It takes you through 2 scenes that are relatable for a college student — dining hall, dorm bathroom, where the user can go through daily actions and see how simple actions like not wasting food and showering for a shorter time can make a real impact. The user is then transported to a garden, where they can see how cumulative saved amounts of water and compost can be used.

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