Immersive and virtual tools to see and understand climate change impacts on glaciers: a new challenge for scientific dissemination and inclusive education

Abstract

Dissemination and communication of landscape features have been for long time an important goal for explorers and travellers. The description of landforms and of the processes that determine them now assume a key role in geoeducation. From this point of view, outdoor experiences represent a great opportunity to improve the scientific knowledge of students. However, field work and field experience can be limited by both external and internal causes. For instance, organizational, economic, pandemic and personal issues can reduce the opportunities to take advantage of outdoor experiences, especially for the most fragile students such as those with disabilities. These problems are even bigger when environments difficult to reach are concerned, like glaciers. For this reason, after a brief historical background on the techniques used to describe landscapes and the related processes, we propose an innovative application of virtual tools for education and outreach activities: an immersive experience to visit an alpine glacier by means of 360° contents. The chosen area is the Forni Glacier (Stelvio National Park, Italy). The high resolution of videos and pictures from the proposed virtual visit brings the investigated area really close to viewers and it conveys the illusion of a real field trip. In order to increase the fruition of this innovative experience, we make the multimedia products usable everywhere via smartphone or tablet or by means of VR (Virtual Reality) headsets. We present also the results from some tests to evaluate the educational and disseminative efficacy on different targets.