virtual reality simulation for manipulationg climate change environmental psychology social psychology psychological distance social identity

People from the Future

People from the Future is an immersive virtual reality simulation designed to investigate how direct, symbolic contact with future generations can shape the way people perceive climate change and their responsibility toward those who will live after us. The experience is grounded in social identity and social categorization approaches, exploring whether future generations can become psychologically included within a broader sense of “us” rather than being perceived as distant and abstract others.

The simulation takes participants on a virtual journey from the present day to the year 2226. The experience is structured as a short narrative sequence: after an introductory scene, participants undergo a temporal transition that transports them more than two centuries into the future. They then find themselves in a city of 2226, where they encounter two inhabitants of the future who describe what has happened to human society over the intervening centuries.

The VR paradigm includes two experimental conditions. In the climate-change condition, participants enter a degraded future city where the consequences of global warming and ecological deterioration are clearly visible. The environment depicts a future characterized by impoverished landscapes, deteriorating living conditions, resource scarcity, and signs of ecological and social collapse. The two future inhabitants explain how climate change has affected both the environment and human life. In the neutral control condition, participants visit a future city of comparable immersive and perceptual complexity, but without references to climate change or environmental crisis. Here, the two inhabitants instead describe the evolution of human civilization and urban life.

Rather than simply presenting information about distant environmental consequences, the simulation is designed to make the future experientially and socially present. Meeting people who supposedly live in 2226 transforms future generations from an abstract category into concrete social actors with whom participants can interact. In this way, VR is used to investigate whether immersive contact with the future can increase emotional engagement, identification with future generations, perceived intergenerational continuity, and pro-environmental behavioural intentions.

The project therefore uses immersive technology not only to visualize a possible future, but also to explore a broader psychological question: can experiencing future generations as part of the same human community strengthen our sense of responsibility for the long-term consequences of present-day actions? The research specifically examines emotional responses, social identification with future generations, and pro-environmental intentions, while also assessing key VR-related processes such as presence and embodiment.

virtual reality environment for testing psychological restorativeness

VR Multisensory Blue-Space Environment

This virtual reality environment was developed to investigate how people perceive and psychologically respond to blue spaces, with a particular focus on the restorative qualities of marine environments and on emotional responses related to environmental change and degradation.

The experience reconstructs an uninhabited island environment in which the sea represents the central perceptual and experiential element. The virtual setting was designed as a controlled naturalistic space in which participants can be exposed to the same visual environment while researchers manipulate additional sensory information.

A key feature of the system is its integration with an external olfactory stimulation device. The VR application can send Wi-Fi signals to an Arduino-based controller, which in turn activates an aroma diffuser. This allows researchers to associate the same virtual marine environment with different olfactory conditions and to systematically investigate how smell interacts with visual immersion in shaping the perception of natural environments.

The paradigm was specifically conceived to study psychological responses to blue spaces, including constructs such as perceived restorativeness, solastalgia, environmental appraisal, and affective responses to nature. By keeping the visual environment constant while varying olfactory stimulation, the system makes it possible to examine the contribution of multisensory integration to the experience of immersive natural settings.

The environment is therefore intended not only as a virtual reconstruction of a coastal ecosystem, but as a multisensory experimental platform for studying how visual and olfactory information jointly influence the psychological experience of marine and coastal environments.

The application is currently under testing and refinement and is being used as part of an ongoing experimental study. The present build should therefore be considered an active research prototype whose technical configuration and experimental parameters may continue to evolve during data collection.

virtual reality simulation for manipulationg climate change environmental psychology social psychology psychological distance

Envisioning Tirreno: Experiencing Climate Change

Envisioning Tirreno is an immersive virtual reality experience designed to make the consequences of climate change on Mediterranean marine ecosystems more tangible, personal, and emotionally engaging. Rather than observing environmental change from an external perspective, participants experience the virtual environment from the embodied perspective of a sea turtle moving through a representation of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

During the experience, users explore the marine environment, search for food, and interact with the ecosystem while progressively witnessing environmental transformations associated with climate change and human impact. Over the course of the simulation, approximately 70 years of ecological change are compressed into a few minutes, allowing participants to directly experience processes that would otherwise unfold over several decades. As time progresses, food resources become scarcer, marine litter increases, and the surrounding ecosystem gradually deteriorates.

The experience combines embodiment, environmental storytelling, and interactive gameplay to investigate whether immersive virtual reality can reduce the psychological distance of climate change and strengthen people’s connection with threatened marine ecosystems. By placing users inside the perspective of a vulnerable marine animal, Envisioning Tirreno is designed not simply to communicate information about environmental change, but to provide an experiential representation of what such change may mean for the organisms inhabiting these ecosystems.

Developed as a research tool within our work on VR, environmental psychology, and pro-environmental behaviour, Envisioning Tirreno can be used to examine psychological processes such as environmental concern, emotional responses, connectedness with nature, identification with non-human agents, perceived psychological distance from climate change, and intentions to engage in sustainable behaviours.

virtual reality simulation for waste sorting climate change environmental psychology

Just Separate: Learning Waste-Sorting Rules

Just Separate is a gamified virtual reality experience designed to support the learning of correct waste-sorting procedures through direct practice, contextualized feedback, and repeated interaction. Rather than focusing primarily on general environmental awareness, the experience targets a more practical barrier to sustainable behavior: knowing exactly how to act when recycling rules, bin colors, or local collection systems are unfamiliar or have recently changed.

The virtual environment reproduces the ecological waste-sorting stations of a real eco-resort in Tuscany, including the newly introduced color-coded recycling system. After a short tutorial, participants are introduced to the task by a small squirrel mascot, which explains that waste has been left around the area and asks the user to help restore order by sorting it correctly. Users then interact with a set of different waste items scattered throughout the environment and must place each object in the appropriate recycling bin.

The experience is built around a learning-by-doing approach. Correct choices are reinforced through immediate positive feedback and an in-world progress counter, while incorrect choices trigger a clear error message and a voice-over explaining the correct disposal category. The incorrectly sorted object then reappears, allowing the participant to try again. The experience ends only when all items have been sorted correctly, ensuring that participants complete the task through successful practice rather than passive exposure to information.

Just Separate was developed as both an educational tool and an experimental research environment. Its aim is to strengthen three closely related outcomes: knowledge of local recycling rules, task-specific self-efficacy, and intentions to sort waste correctly. By reproducing realistic environmental cues and coupling them with immediate corrective feedback, the simulation is designed to reduce procedural uncertainty and help users connect abstract sorting rules with concrete actions.

The environment has already been tested in a real-world field study conducted during the introduction of a new waste-sorting infrastructure at an eco-resort. Following the VR experience, participants showed significant increases in knowledge of the new sorting rules, confidence in their ability to sort waste correctly, and behavioral intentions. The strongest improvement was observed for objective knowledge of the new recycling system.

For this reason, Just Separate provides a practical example of how immersive technologies can be used not only to communicate sustainability messages, but also to train specific pro-environmental behaviors through situated, interactive practice. Its gamified structure, visible progress, repeated attempts, and corrective feedback make it particularly suited for contexts in which people need to learn or update concrete environmental routines.