Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality as Main Core in a Transmedia Storytelling Strategy Against “Ocean Blindness”

Abstract

Although 71% of the planet is covered by ocean, we suffer from oceanic blindness; we tend to underestimate its importance and significance. We live in ignorance of how our actions affect the health of the ocean, its resources, and the increasingly fragile sustainability of the many activities that depend on it. The ocean is the life support and the lung of the Earth. Earle (2009) declared "Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance." We are not fully aware of the unprecedented pressure we are subjecting the ocean to, and caring for our ocean is one of the keys in developing a strategy to reduce or mitigate the effects of climate change. Oceanic blindness is widely extended in Chile. Children grow up under the premise that our country is a "long and narrow strip of land," a wrong premise that prevents them from approaching the ocean. In fact, Chile is more sea than land, with a coastline that exceeds 83,500 km, equivalent to twice the equator line. In addition, it exercises sovereignty over an Exclusive Economic Zone of 200 nautical miles and 350 nautical miles of oceanic areas surrounding the archipelagos and Chilean Polynesian islands. The country has several marine ecosystems, some of them being present in only a few places in the world (fjords, glaciers, upwelling areas, and zones of minimum oxygen concentration). However, many Chileans, excluding those from island communities, are not fully aware of the importance of the sea. Few, apart from those who rely on coastal environments for their livelihoods, look at the sea and give it an important place in their worldview. The inclusion of cosmologies from island communities in oceanic science communication will contribute to a gradual appropriation by communities that live at distance from the ocean. How to do this is a challenge. It is necessary to use innovative, inclusive, and accessible products that call the attention of our main target audience: children and adolescents.Seen from the outside, it could be considered that in Chile there is not enough research done on marine and oceanographic subjects. In fact, in 2018, the Universidad de Concepción was ranked, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), as the number one institute for oceanographic studies in Latin America. The