Previous research has shown that immersive virtual reality (VR) is a suitable tool for visualizing the consequences of climate change. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether visualization in VR has a stronger influence on climate change awareness and environmental attitudes compared to traditional media. Furthermore, it was examined how realistic a VR experience has to be in order to have an effect. The VR experience consisted of a model of the Aletsch glacier (Switzerland) melting over the course of 220 years. Explicit measurements (new environmental paradigm NEP, climate change scepticism, and nature relatedness) and an implicit measurement (implicit association test) were collected before and after the VR intervention and compared to three different non-VR control conditions (video, images with text, and plain text). In addition, the VR environment was varied in terms of degrees of realism and sophistication (3 conditions: abstract visualization, less sophisticated realistic visualization, more sophisticated realistic visualization). The six experimental conditions (3 VR conditions, three control conditions) were modeled as mixed effects, with VR versus control used as a fixed effect in a mixed effects modeling framework. Across all six conditions, environmental awareness (NEP) was higher after the participants (N = 142) had been confronted with the glacier melting, while no differences were found for nature relatedness and climate change scepticism before and after the interventions. There was no significant difference between VR and control conditions for any of the four measurements. Nevertheless, contrast analyses revealed that environmental awareness increased significantly only for the VR but not for the control conditions, suggesting that VR is more likely to lead to attitude change. Our results show that exposure to VR environments successfully increased environmental awareness independently of the design choices, suggesting that even abstract and less sophisticated VR environment designs may be sufficient to increase pro-environmental attitudes.

BACKGROUND: Avatars in Virtual Reality (VR) can not only represent humans, but also embody intelligent software agents that communicate with humans, thus enabling a new paradigm of human-machine interaction. OBJECTIVE: The research agenda proposed in this paper by an interdisciplinary team is motivated by the premise that a conversation with a smart agent avatar in VR means more than giving a face and body to a chatbot. Using the concrete communication task of patient education, this research agenda is rather intended to explore which patterns and practices must be constructed visually, verbally, para- and nonverbally between humans and embodied machines in a counselling context so that humans can integrate counselling by an embodied VR smart agent into their thinking and acting in one way or another. METHODS: The scientific literature in different bibliographical databases was reviewed. A qualitative narrative approach was applied for analysis. RESULTS: A research agenda is proposed which investigates how recurring consultations of patients with healthcare professionals are currently conducted and how they could be conducted with an embodied smart agent in immersive VR. CONCLUSIONS: Interdisciplinary teams consisting of linguists, computer scientists, visual designers and health care professionals are required which need to go beyond a technology-centric solution design approach. Linguists’ insights from discourse analysis drive the explorative experiments to identify test and discover what capabilities and attributes the smart agent in VR must have, in order to communicate effectively with a human being.

The legion camp "Vindonissa" in Switzerland is considered one of the most important Roman excavation sites north of the Alps. Research there has been conducted for over a century and reconstructive drawings have always been a way to showcase scientific progress. The earliest of these drawings date back to 1909. In 2015, the local archaeological service decided that a new series of illustrations should be produced. Topographical data, archaeological plans, as well as building profiles provided by experts were the basis for these illustrations.Future uses of the same model could include animations or real-time applications for augmented and virtual reality. In order to avoid remodeling for these uses, the whole camp and its surrounding settlements had to be constructed as adaptive and flexible 3D models. The requirements on a model for still rendering are very different from those on real-time renderings in game engines. Also, the reasonable level of detail for images on eye level is very different from the level of detail for bird's-eye panorama. Therefore, the main challenge was to develop an efficient workflow for multiple output media and different points of view.While some of the proposed methods proved to facilitate the process without adding time needed for modeling, there still remain a lot of open questions. A "living document" should allow all stakeholders (excavators, archaeologists, historians, and illustrators) to access and change information in all stages of the process. This still has to be considered a long-term goal and is a problem far from being solved.