Energy, Community, and Immersive Technology

Various types of stakeholders are involved in energy production, distribution, and consumption, which are important to the society. However, community conflicts and tensions often emerge as a result of lack of mutual understanding between stakeholders.

Energy production involve many highly specialized knowledge. Production facilities are in remote or inaccessible areas, but they also are built within or around residential areas. All o those factors can complicate community communications.

We prepare and conduct a series of studies to explore the use of VR to inform and facilitate participation, discussion, and decision-making among community stakeholders in the context of energy production.

Other Info:

• Funding Sources:
  - Penn State University's Strategic Plan (for ChoroPhronesis lab);
  - Penn State University's College of Agricultural Sciences (for PennState Extension)
  

Study 1:
A joint immersive VR tour, guided live by an energy production domain expert, to let undergraduate students in an Energy Policy class virtually and concurrently visit energy production facilities in a classroom setting.

After the VR tour, students, the expert, and the instructing professor discussed and reflected on the experiences. We gathered and analyzed such feedback, along with other collected responses, to assess the joint VR experience.

Other related studies:
To be added soon....

• Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Jack (Shen-Kuen) Chang, Jiayan Zhao, Pejman Sajjadi, Danielle Oprean, Thomas B. Murphy, Jennifer Baka, and Alexander Klippel. "For the Many, Not the One: Designing Low-Cost Joint VR Experiences for Place-Based Learning." In International Conference on Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (EuroVR '19'), pp. 126-148. Springer, 2019. [pdf] / [pub]