Figure 1: Example of the VR game with the time remaining to evacuate.

As wildfires increasingly threaten communities worldwide, those at risk can benefit from community-centric approaches to designing interventions. A multi-layered approach can make members of the community powerful co-designers by incorporating their ideas alongside insights from experts and designers to successfully create and deploy an intervention. We took a community-centered Research through Design approach to develop a Serious Game to promote wildfire preparedness in two communities. Participatory Design workshops, interviews, and targeted user studies allowed us to leverage local knowledge of residents and expertise of stakeholders at distinct stages where their insight could be best utilized. Based on this work, we propose a process for designing Serious Games as interventions for complex societal challenges by utilizing community and expert involvement throughout iteration. Our findings suggest that the games we designed following this process lead to concrete learning and opportunities for discussion, and offer flexibility for integration with other community initiatives.

This demo presents a virtual reality simulation of a wildfire evacuation. Players are tasked with going through a home environment and collecting items they believe they would need and want to take if they were under an evacuation notice. The experience is playable on the Meta Quest 2 headset.

Ocean scientists studying diverse organisms and phenomena increasingly rely on imaging devices for their research. These scientists have many tools to collect their data, but few resources for automated analysis. In this paper, we report on discussions with diverse stakeholders to identify community needs and develop a set of functional requirements for the ongoing development of ocean science-specific analysis tools. We conducted 36 in-depth interviews with individuals working in the Blue Economy space, revealing four central issues inhibiting the development of effective imaging analysis monitoring tools for marine science. We also identified twelve user archetypes that will engage with these services. Additionally, we held a workshop with 246 participants from 35 countries centered around FathomNet, a web-based open-source annotated image database for marine research. Findings from these discussions are being used to define the feature set and interface design of Ocean Vision AI, a suite of tools and services to advance observational capabilities of life in the ocean.

Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) are essential to human-operated underwater expeditions in the deep sea. However, piloting an ROV to safely interact with live ecosystems is an expensive and cognitively demanding task, requiring extensive maneuvering and situational awareness. Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) could address some of these challenges. This paper investigates how VR HMDs influence operator performance through a novel telepresence system for piloting ROVs in real-time. We present an empirical user study [N=12] that examines common midwater creature capture tasks, comparing Stereoscopic-VR, Monoscopic-VR, and Desktop teleoperation conditions. Our findings indicate that Stereoscopic-VR can outperform Monoscopic-VR and Desktop ROV capture tasks, effectively doubling the efficacy of operators. We also found significant differences in presence, task load, usability, intrinsic motivation, and cybersickness. Our research points to new opportunities towards VR with ROVs.