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感受親手砍下老樹的震撼 VR技術翻轉環教想像

  

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本報2016年7月1日綜合外電報導，姜唯編譯；蔡麗伶審校

我們可能無法光靠虛擬實境（Virtual Reality，VR）拯救地球，但研究人員認為，VR有助於提升環境問題意識，學術和政策場域也開始用VR呈現污染或人類活動對環境的衝擊。

史丹佛大學傳播系教授貝蘭森（Jeremy Bailenson）開發出VR互動遊戲，說明海洋酸化議題。攝影：Linda A. Cicero；圖片來源：Stanford News Service

VR環境教學計畫 兼具娛樂、知性

「不管你住在世界上哪個角落，都可以藉由VR切身體驗遠方的環境破壞情況，對環境問題產生危機感和急迫感。」史丹佛大學傳播系教授貝蘭森（Jeremy Bailenson）說。貝蘭森的虛擬互動實驗室（Virtual Human Interaction Lab，VHIL）今年發表了一部VR紀錄短片和VR互動遊戲，藉以說明海洋酸化問題。

「因應氣候變遷的最大挑戰，不只是說服抱持懷疑論的政客，而是讓大家親眼目睹，汽車廢氣和能源效率差的房子在未來幾十年會造成何種後果。」貝蘭森說。

VHIL製作的紀錄片和電玩，也在今年4月的紐約翠貝卡影展（Tribeca Film Festival）上播出，紀錄片中的影像已出現在谷歌（Google）的VR教學計畫「Google Expeditions」中。Google Expedition雖然仍在實驗階段，但全球已經有超過100萬位學童體驗，且將會讓更多學童加入。

目前已有多份研究證實VHIL的教學效果，例如體驗過VR的學生比較不會浪費紙張，因為學生能體會砍下一棵古老紅杉樹的震撼——運作鏈鋸慢慢讓樹木倒下，過程中的聲音和震動觸感都能切身感受。

「Google Expeditions將帶給學生教科書和課堂上無法傳遞的經驗，是完全不同的媒介，強而有力而且高度參與，帶學生到無法親自前往的地方。」谷歌教育計畫產品經理雷納德（James Leonard）說。

你我都是視覺動物 影像的感染力最強

可以想見，VR初期大部分的投資將在娛樂應用上，像是VR電影和電玩。自然紀錄片導演艾登堡（David Attenborough）不久前製作出大堡礁潛水的VR，原本的用意是娛樂，但也相當富有教育意義。

目前，谷歌和史丹佛的計畫是少數致力於環境的VR教學計畫。許多環境問題錯綜複雜，難以全方面解釋，氣候變遷、海洋酸化、物種滅絕和冰河侵蝕等現象尤其難以描述，不僅因為發生速度緩慢，也因為發生在偏遠、難以到達的地方。

貝蘭森認為VR解決了上述困難。只要有軟體、影片和VR頭盔，任何人都可以看見亞馬遜、北極甚至海底的環境變化。

「VR平台讓從未到過海裡的人看見海洋酸化對海洋生物的影響。人類是視覺動物，影像的影響力最大。」VR計畫顧問、加州大學聖塔克魯茲分校生態與演化生物學助理教授克勞克（Kristy Kroeker）說。

【相關文章】

• 「石油用光光」 網路虛擬現實遊戲啟動

【參考資料】

• YALE e360（2016年6月27日），Can Virtual Reality Emerge As a Tool for Conservation?

27 JUN 2016: DISPATCH

Can Virtual Reality Emerge
As a Tool for Conservation?

New advances in technology are sparking efforts to use virtual reality to help people gain a deeper appreciation of environmental challenges. VR experiences, researchers say, can be especially useful in conveying key issues that are slow to develop, such as climate change and extinction.

by heather millar

HTC Corp

A user tests out the Vive virtual reality headset.

Could virtual reality (VR) — immersive digital experiences that mimic reality — save the environment? 

Well, that may be a bit of a stretch. But researchers say that it could perhaps promote better understanding of nature and give people empathetic insight into environmental challenges. 

“Virtual reality can give everyone, regardless of where they live, the kind of experience needed to generate the urgency required to prevent environmental calamity,” says Jeremy Bailenson, professor of communication at Stanford University. 

Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) this year released a short VR documentary and an interactive VR game that seek to explain the issue of ocean acidification, the process by which excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dissolves in the ocean, making it more acidic and less healthy for ocean life. 

As Bailenson notes, “One of the greatest challenges to staving off irrevocable climate change isn't simply getting buy-in from skeptical politicians – it’s getting people to visualize how driving a gas-guzzling car or living in an energy inefficient home is contributing to a problem that may only manifest itself completely in future decades.” 

The lab’s documentary and game were presented at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. 

Phenomena such as ocean acidification are difficult to illustrate because they happen in slow motion.

Video from the documentary has been adapted to be included in Google Expeditions, a VR educational program that’s still in beta, but has already been shown to one million school kids around the world and will soon be released to many more. 

“Google Expeditions will be the means to reach the student for whom the textbook or the lecture isn’t working,” explains James Leonard, a program manager on the Google for Education team. “It’s a totally different medium. It’s powerful and super-engaging. It will bring students closer to places they otherwise wouldn’t be able to visit.” 

So far, the Google/Stanford effort seems to be one of the few aimed specifically at environmental education. Predictably, a lot of early VR investment is going into entertainment applications: VR movies and games. 

The nature documentary filmmaker David Attenborough has just produced a VR experience of a dive in the Great Barrier Reef. While meant to entertain, that project will no doubt educate as well. In more academic and policy settings, VR is beginning to be used mostly to create 3D representations of pollution or other human impacts on wild areas. 

Many environmental issues are complex and difficult to explain fully. Phenomena like climate change, ocean acidification, extinction, and glacier erosion are especially challenging to illustrate, either because

Cody Karutz

An all-angle camera helps scientists recreate ecosystems for virtual reality.

they’re happening in slow motion or because they’re evolving in remote places that few people see, or both. 

Virtual reality solves many of these problems, Bailenson says. With the proper software, video feed and VR headset, just about anyone might be able to experience environmental change in the Amazon, the Arctic, or even under the ocean. 

When I take my ocean acidification dive, I jump off from Palo Alto, California. 

One minute, I’m in a high tech virtual reality (VR) lab at Stanford University, standing on a “haptic” floor of aeronautic aluminum that can move and vibrate to simulate the feeling of movement, encircled by speakers that can immerse me in sound, and by cameras that can track my every move, where I look, how and where I turn my body. 

The next minute, I put on the VR headset and suddenly I’m in Italy, near the northern end of the Gulf of Naples, on a jetty that extends from a volcanic island called Ischia. To say it looks and feels idyllic would be an understatement: The sun glints off the waves and bright primary color boats bob in the harbor. On the island, pastel stucco houses stair-step up toward a gray, crenelated castle. Above water, everything seems lovely. 

Then I’m underwater. The sea around Ischia, it turns out, provides a perfect place to show people the contrast between a healthy ocean and an acidified one: In one part of the harbor, colorful schools of fish rush past me. Sea grasses undulate. Eel squiggle by brilliant coral reefs. Along the bottom potter various species of sea snail. 

Next, I turn to the part of the harbor where volcanic vents have created an acidified environment: The corals, the eel, and many of the fish have disappeared. Everything looks red-brown and murky as certain types of algae have taken over. 

In my headset, Prof. Fio Micheli of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey says, “One of the most difficult parts of my research is getting people to care about ocean acidification.” 

Full disclosure here: I knew all about ocean acidification before the VR tour; I’ve written about it for various magazines. But as I took off my VR headset, I felt upset and deeply sad. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an experience — even a digital one — seems to be worth many more. As music video director and VR entrepreneur Chris Milk has put it, VR is an “empathy machine.” 

“The virtual reality platform allows someone who has never even been in the ocean to experience what ocean acidification can do to marine life. We are visual creatures, and visual examples can be very striking,” explains Kristy Kroeker, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a consultant on the VR project. 

There was a lot of hype about VR in the 1990s, followed by technical challenges, missteps, and public disappointment. This time, the technology seems poised to become a mass experience. Costs have come way down and computing power is improving all the time. 

Google cardboard headsets and the Samsung Gear VR dipped a toe into this new universe last year, but experts generally said they were not quite ready for prime time. 

If people have a VR experience of cutting down an old-growth redwood, they are more likely to conserve paper.

However, in late March, Facebook released the Oculus Rift headset, an immersive VR setup intended for mass market use, priced at $599, about $1,500 with a bundled computer. The first 30 Rift games have gone on sale, with another 100 to follow by the end of the year. 

Competitors such as HTC Vive, Sony PlayStation VR, and the Microsoft HoloLens are on the way. There are reports that both Google and Apple have projects targeting this new market. 

Meanwhile, the ocean VR experiences produced by VHIL are building on a decade of social science research that shows people who have a VR experience are more likely to change behavior in ways that benefit the planet. 

For instance, various VHIL studies have shown: 

• If a person has a VR experience of cutting down an old-growth redwood tree — feeling the vibration and sound of the chainsaw, the crash of the tree as it falls — that person is more likely to conserve paper. 

• If a person takes a VR shower and sees their avatar or doppelganger eating coal to represent the amount of energy used, that person is more likely to conserve water. 

Cody Karutz

Divers prepare to take footage of coral reefs for the Stanford acidification VR experience.

• People who experienced an early version of my ocean acidification “dive” — one with more cartoonish graphics and less accurate biology — cared more about the issue than other people who just watched a video about it. 

VHIL is developing a fish avatar project, which will take movement data from electronically tagged fish in the kelp forests of Monterey Bay and transfer it into a virtual reality where people will be able to join the fish in their underwater world. The project’s goal is to enable individuals to “adopt a fish,” thus becoming more invested in the bay’s future. 

Currently, VHIL is working on how to distribute the latest ocean acidification experiences. Obviously, Google Expeditions provides one outlet. But having secured project funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Stanford team now hopes to get as many views as possible for the documentary and the game as well. They’re also designing studies to measure the effect of the content. 

Cody Karutz, the Stanford team’s hardware manager, acknowledges that there’s still quite a bit of work to be done fine-tuning these experiences. For instance, you start the game on a boat in the Ischia harbor, but I found myself getting distracted by wanting to turn the ship’s wheel, which isn’t yet possible. 

When I was “swimming” around trying to collect samples in the game, my brain balked at conflict between the visual information — swimming horizontally — and the physical information — standing vertically in a lab.

ALSO FROM YALE e360

Green Failure: What’s Wrong
With Environmental Education?

Marine conservationist Charles Saylan believes the U.S. educational system is failing to create responsible citizens who consider themselves stewards of the environment. To do that, he says in a Yale Environment 360 interview, educators need to go beyond rhetoric and make environmental values a central part of a public education. 
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Also, as I was swimming and bent to collect samples in the game, I had this weird feeling that half my body was above the sea floor, the other half below it. 

“Typical live camera arrays still capture two-dimensional information. The challenge is combining those with an additional sense of depth and integrating them over frames of time to create interactive graphics,” Karutz explains. “Computing power and data storage are the limitations right now, and that will sure change over the next few years.” 

Lots of people experience stimulation overload when experiencing both VR and a voice-over with content. The team is experimenting to find the best way to explain content without making people nauseated. There’s a fridge in the lab stocked with ginger ale for those who get woozy. I partook.

POSTED ON 27 JUN 2016 IN BIODIVERSITY BUSINESS & INNOVATION CLIMATE OCEANS OCEANS SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY AUSTRALIA EUROPE NORTH AMERICA