Learning the dangers of storm surges in virtual reality: Coastal leaders’ attitudes toward VR as a risk communication tool

Alexandra Frank (Ph.D. student), Joshua Baldwin (Grady postdoctoral research associate), Matthew Browning, Shua Yuan, Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn (in press). “Learning the dangers of storm surges in virtual reality: Coastal leaders’ attitudes toward VR as a risk communication tool.” Environmental Education Research. 

Abstract: Educating coastal residents on the dangers of storm surge is one of the core missions of coastal community leaders. Virtual reality (VR) can help communicate risks by simulating storm surge events as if they are happening at the moment, and allowing participants to virtually practice mitigation behaviors. However, VR must first be accepted and adopted by community leaders prior to implementation at large. Guided by the technology acceptance model, forty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted with coastal community leaders after they experienced a VR education module of a hurricane-induced storm surge event. Themes pulled from the analysis revealed that attitudes and adoption potential of VR centered on perceptions of ease of use and usefulness. Media features that emerged as relevant in their decision-making process included emotional impact, novelty, ability to be distributed, and customizability of VR hardware and content.