A study examining twelve United Nations Virtual Reality (UNVR) content productions, created as part of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to utilize experiential media (EM) in climate change communication, has found that all twelve utilized limited qualities of EM.

The study also revealed that UNVR did not present climate change data in an interactive form and did not feature auditory interaction as part of the immersive experience.

Understanding how the UNVR productions frame and contextualize climate change issues, and whether the VR productions take a multidisciplinary approach similar to the UN's landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 special report (which highlighted the urgency of climate crisis including the Global Warming limit of 1.5°C that was formally approved by the world's governments in 2018), was also a focus of the research.

These experiences afforded by VR, in turn, are believed to increase the audience’s understanding of the content they are watching, which in this case means if they understand, they may be more likely to take action to mitigate climate change because of watching climate change content that takes full advantage of VR.

The study’s author, SC&I Ph.D. Candidate Shravan Regret Iyer, said, “Such insights surrounding the UNVR content on climate change are limited, and my study attempted to address that gap in the literature, particularly considering VR's potential applications in science communication due to its affordances, including 3-dimensional visualization and multi-sensory presentation of the topic and the fact that key players of VR (i.e., technology and platform providers such as Meta and Apple) are pushing VR technology to the forefront which could in turn be beneficial for climate change communicators.”

His findings, Iyer said, also offer further insights into the role of VR in increasing pro-environmental behavior, knowledge gains, and climate actions.

Iyer’s study, “Examining United Nations VR Content Production Usage of Experiential Media in Climate Change Storytelling: A Qualitative Analysis,” was published in the  Jurnal Pengajian Media Malaysia (Malaysian Journal of Media Studies). Vol. 25(2), 2023: 51−66.

Prior to the study’s publication, Iyer presented this research in a paper titled “Virtual Reality and Climate Change: Understanding How the United Nations VR Content Productions Uses Experiential Media in Climate Change Storytelling” at the 105th Annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Conference which was held August 3-6, 2022 in Detroit, Michigan.

To conduct the study, Iyer said he explored the extent to which the twelve UNVR content productions utilized six qualities of experiential media (interactivity, immersion, multisensory presentation, algorithm and data, first-person perspective, and natural user interface) as outlined in the EM theoretical framework created in 2018 by SC&I Professor of Journalism and Media Studies John Pavlik.  

By applying the EM theoretical framework by Pavlik, Iyer said the study has highlighted how UNVR content can:

• “Potentially transform the role of the audience to a more active user who experiences stories as a participant (first-person perspective) rather than an audience member who tends to passively watch and listen or read the narrative from a third-person’s perspective.
• “Potentially enable the user to experience the medium and participate or engage in a story or content as a virtual phenomenon, including engagement through haptics and spatial audio (interactivity and multisensory presentation).
• “Help situate the UNVR experiences or the design of the stories in the virtual environment to six degrees of freedom (DoF) to allow the user to look about and move about, traveling forward/backward, up/down, and left/ right in the virtual environment (natural user interface) instead of only 3DoF, which is the case with many 360-degree video simulations. Such design components of the story should also include other sensory experiences, such as touch and 360-degree auditory envelopment, and not just be limited to sight.
• “Give the user a complete sense of presence (immersion).”

These experiences afforded by VR, in turn, are believed to increase the audience’s understanding of the content they are watching, which in this case means if they understand, they may be more likely to take action to mitigate climate change because of watching climate change content that takes full advantage of VR.

Because other research contends that visual framing is particularly powerful as a means for engaging people and potentially for effective communication of science around climate change, his study therefore highlighted the importance of framing and contextualizing climate change causes from various points of view.

In addition, Iyer said, because other research contends that visual framing is particularly powerful as a means for engaging people and potentially for effective communication of science around climate change, his study therefore highlighted the importance of framing and contextualizing climate change causes from various points of view.

“A growing body of scholarly work contends that climate change communication is currently witnessing a ‘perfect communication storm’ due to the increasing number of challenges it poses from multiple fronts for science communicators,” Iyer said. “One of the challenges in science communication, particularly on topics such as climate change, is that scientific content has many describable attributes, and prospective learners or lay audiences cannot pay attention to all extant facts about the phenomena. Hence, scholars argue that science communicators need to make choices about what parts of climate change topics they should emphasize for consumers of scientific information.”

Learn more about the Ph.D. Program at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information on the website.