Engineering Immersive Environments to Achieve Sustainability Goals: "Thought for Food"

Imagine designing an immersive environment to help learners experience the unique journeys of a banana, a goat, and a chicken from their jungle tree, goat farm, and chicken pen to learners' local markets. Such a task is fraught with challenge, and much of the challenge comes in determining the answers to critical design questions. We will describe such an environment, Thought for Food (TFF), and demonstrate how immersive environments can be engineered to achieve a wide range of goals—including the ambitious goal of guiding users toward environmental impact—in part by intentionally incorporating varied levels of abstraction.

Outcomes: Compare high versus low levels of abstraction and rate the ability of each approach to produce the desired experience for users * Classify different forms of immersion in virtual environments to meet project goals and objectives * Consider ways to leverage VR to achieve instructional and sustainability goals through embodied learning