Envisioning Tirreno: Experiencing Climate Change Through Virtual Reality

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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.

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