Public services

Each location and scenario offers the user a realistic and immersive experience of extreme weather conditions. For example, the user might experience an avalanche and afterward receive a set of suggestions for how this catastrophe could have been avoided or had its impact reduced. In this case, planning trees could have prevented the avalanche.

NbS is an important aspect of climate change mitigation, as it aims to protect and enhance biodiversity, blend seamlessly into the landscape, and provide a host of co-benefits in addition to securing citizens and infrastructure. In order to see more such green solutions, it is essential to educate both decision-makers and the public on what NbS are, their benefits, and how to implement them.

While the information about climate change and its consequences is widely available, it takes something more to succeed in influencing, educating, and engaging effectively. Extensive research shows that immersive experiences are great for learning – exposing people to unexpected and realistic cases forces them to learn more profoundly than reading or listening to facts does. Could we create a memorable experience that makes them move from thought to action when preventing climate disasters?

Creating an engaging and accessible way to influence stakeholders

Storyboarding has been crucial in developing this immersive solution. Thanks to using storyboards in the process, we created an engaging and truly immersive experience for the users. Storyboarding is a technique that facilitates the process of creating high-quality and interesting stories with a good flow and storytelling technique. 

Innlandet County and NGI (The Norwegian Geotechnical Institute) had already devised the idea to test immersive technology as a solution.

Experienced tech developers and designers from EGGS collaborated closely with the client to explore what this solution could look like. Through agile methodology, with the help of thorough field and user insight and storyboarding, we developed an immersive VR app.

The app lets users experience a wide range of realistic scenarios and impacts of climate change and extreme weather conditions. Apart from offering the experience of the impact on different locations, the software also supplies the user with a series of suggestions for concrete action to reduce the negative impact.

 was completed and published on the Oculus ‘App labs’ in April 2021. Innlandet County is looking into funding for further development of the Phusicos VR.

An immersive VR app for extreme weather conditions

During the project, new versions of the app were made available weekly for everyone involved. This continued delivery ad testing helped shape a result that was supported by everyone.

Immersive tech, just like any tech, has great potential but little value unless 

 and a clear purpose in mind. In this case, we ensured to develop and design the app to support its purpose – to educate and influence the user to take action to prevent extreme weather-related disasters. By gathering insights from stakeholders and experts in the field and designing with the user experience and storytelling in mind, the result is engaging and realistic and offers concrete action points.

Digital Interactions

Purposeful design and an engaging experience

By researching different scenarios and cases and interviewing field experts (geologists, climate specialists, etc), we could design realistic and credible scenarios and experiences. The data in the app was imported directly from NGI (Norway’s Geotechnological Institute) and is based on climate research data.  

Since its launch, the PHUSICOS-VR learning platform has been surveyed and demonstrated successful results and responses from users. After testing, an average of 4.16 out of 5 responded that they had acquired new knowledge, along with a new attitude towards NbS (Nature-based Solutions). The survey also shows a very positive view of VR as a learning platform (4.75 out of 5).*

Source: Report PHUSICOS - According to nature, Deliverable D6.1/DG.2.

Phusicos VR – Immersive tech to help prevent climate disasters