Seeing Landscapes Through Virtual Reality

A team of geographers in Wales, UK, have recently found a way to insert real landscapes into virtual headsets, allowing people to evaluate land without leaving the office. The $7.74 million program is handled by the Welsh government and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

Initially intended to give aspiring young engineers a chance to evaluate landscapes, the project is an effort to introduce sustainable land management. Scientists needed feedback from the public to evaluate the impact of certain landscapes but found that there were few responses from people under the age of 25. To help close the age gap, Professor Ruth Swetnam and Jan Korenko decided to insert mapped landscapes into a gaming system, allowing a virtual reality (VR) experience for survey participants.

The two researchers suggest that VR could be an efficient way of involving more young people in similar surveys in the future. Professor Swetnam concluded that monitoring and assessing landscapes is essential “as they are currently swiftly changing due to climate change.”

VR could help researchers keep track of the ways landscapes change over time, but if it becomes more widely-available over time, it could potentially be used to make surveying more accessible without requiring a physical site visit. Realistic virtual models could make surveyors’ jobs easier and give them the ability to share survey information with more people. For more information on this developing research, see the full article on geoengineer.org.