Week 1 – Week 2
At this stage of the project, we have discussed a variety of different viewpoints and points of analysis relating to immersive content design. We categorized our research questions into two sides, one is Immersive Content Design and another is Evaluating Immersive Content and Wider Social Context.
Immersive Content Design
Q1: Are immersive media helping us care for nature, or gradually replacing real nature with virtual experiences?
Immersive media are increasingly used to present nature and ecological environments, such as endangered habitats, remote locations, and disappearing landscapes. These experiences are often framed as tools for education, conservation, or awareness.
However, there are more fundamental questions:
- When nature can be repeatedly experienced in immersive form, does it gradually become something that can be substituted?
- Are immersive media bringing people closer to nature, or offering a safe, controlled, consequence-free version of it?
- How immersive ecological works represent loss and vulnerability
- Whether they encourage real-world action or offer emotional substitution
- Whether immersive media supplement real nature, or replace it at a cultural level
Evaluating Immersive Content and Wider Social Context
Nature/ climate experiences are reduced to entertainment/ opportunity to sell tickets
rather than heartfelt conservation/ awareness. – Late-stage capitalism.
● Neglect for non western point of view and countries already feeling effects. Climate
experiences say- ‘This is London/ Europe in 100 years’ rather than ‘This is Pacific
Islands/ Maldives etc right now’. The importance of the West, as well as non-Western
regions, need factoring in.
● Who is assumed to be the “ideal user” of immersive ecological experiences?
not studying actual users, but examining how immersive ecological works implicitly
define who is expected to experience them, who is excluded, and who is represented
but not invited.
We focus on several concrete dimensions:
Who are these works designed for?
Where are they exhibited?
What access conditions are required?
What cultural or technical knowledge is assumed?
Who appears in the work, and who does not?
What position is the user placed in?
What political, capitalist, or technological ideologies are hidden behind the
“wasteland,” “post-apocalyptic wasteland,” and “utopian eco-city” landscapes
constructed in games?
For example, in a VR experience about climate change, does the solution lean towards
technological remediation (such as geoengineering) or systemic questioning?
Week 3
Case study
Spangenberger, P., Geiger, S.M. and Freytag, S.-C. (2022) ‘Becoming nature: effects of embodying a tree in immersive virtual reality on nature relatedness’, Scientific Reports, 12(1), p. 1311. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05184-0.
Doonan, N., Oliveira, L. and Ravenelle, C. (2025) ‘Expanding the magic circle: Immersive storytelling that trains environmental perception’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 31(1), pp. 169–190. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231178917.
Ahn, S.J.G. et al. (2016) ‘Experiencing Nature: Embodying Animals in Immersive Virtual Environments Increases Inclusion of Nature in Self and Involvement With Nature: EMBODYING ANIMALS IN IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 21(6), pp. 399–419. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12173.
Exiting Works/ Potential Places to Visit
‘First digital nation’: Tuvalu turns to metaverse as rising seas threaten existence
Visions of Nature: A Mixed Reality Experience- London Natural History Museum
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/visions-of-nature.html
https://askabiologist.asu.edu/vr-360/portal-jump-VR-360-2/ Virtual biome
A.Y. Chang Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games
https://www.gamerswithglasses.com/reviews/playingnature-chang
Exploring the natural history logic of Red Dead Redemption and the consumer ecosystem in The Sims, etc.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (emergent ecology?)
Death Stranding (connected ecology？)
Outer Wilds (celestial ecology and time loops？)
Horizon Zero Dawn (post-human ecology？)
Cyberpunk 2077(post-human ecology？) Exploring the boundaries of nature, body, and technology
Some previous core papers that discussed how XR influence the expression and ppl’s feeling about ecology:
eXtended Reality for promoting people-nature relationships in cities: a scoping review(https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-025-00240-w)
Embodying nature in immersive virtual reality: Are multisensory stimuli vital to affect nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviour?(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131523002415)
Towards Context-Aware Adaptation in Extended Reality: A Design Space for XR Interfaces and an Adaptive Placement Strategy(https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02607)
Week 4
In this week, I generated one more specific research question after reading lots of papers and books:
How do affordance structures operationalize post-human or non-anthropocentric perspectives in the ecological design of immersive media?
(1) In XR ecological design, anthropocentric affordances are typically manifested in three types of structures:
- Action – restrictive affordances (constraints)
Users are not allowed to randomly collect, intervene, or accelerate.
The system conveys ecological boundaries through “what cannot be done” rather than “what can be done”.
→ This reflects that the ecosystem is not a “resource interface” but a system with constraints.
- Non – human – dominated feedback structure (non – human agency)
The ecosystem evolves according to its own logic. Consequences of user behavior:
- Delay
- Non – linearity
- Incomplete controllability
→ Affordances are no longer “tools” but relational structures.
- Reconstruction of perceptual affordances
XR designs not only “what can be done” but also:
- From whose perspective can one see?What scale is perceptible?
- What time structure is the default?
→ Decentralization of human – centricity is often achieved through perceptual decentralization rather than at the operational level.
(2) Why is this issue worth exploring? / The current research gap in this area:
Current research has mainly focused on three “divergent paths”:
- Affordances + games / XR: Discussing interaction, immersion, and action possibilities;
- Immersive media + ecology: Focusing on educational effects, emotional impacts, and environmental attitudes;
- Posthumanism + media: Analyzing narrative, visual metaphor, and ethical stances;
Moreover, most of these studies remain at the narrative level, expressive level, or experiential effect level. They rarely clearly answer how to achieve de – anthropocentrism through the design of systems and perception, and understand XR ecological design as a procedural expression of ethical and political stances.
(3) How to further narrow down the scope of the problem and conduct an in – depth discussion?
- Limit the type of “immersive media”
“…in immersive ecological experiences (VR/XR environments explicitly designed around ecological systems)”
- Limit the aspect of affordances theoretical structure
(Review the theoretical framework of affordance and point out the aspects discussed in this paper)
“…through action and perceptual affordances rather than narrative representation”
- Limit the theoretical spectrum of non – anthropocentrism
“…within posthumanist and non-anthropocentric ecological frameworks”
Week 5
This week, I decided our final research question is surrounding about:
How do affordance(Operational/Perceptual) reflect anthropocentrism vs non-anthropocentrism perspectives* in the ecological* design of interactive immersive media?
Why we want to choose this research question?
The affordances theory has been successfully transplanted into game and VR/XR research to explain how interactions generate meanings and behavioral paths, and it has proven to be a suitable theoretical basis.
Moreover, an increasing number of design practices from the perspective of multispecies/non-anthropocentrism have emerged, but no systematic methods and theoretical summaries have been formed.
Generally speaking, this is an active field with gaps in refinement and systematization.
*Why did I cross out “perspective”?Because borrowing a non – human perspective might be a means for some cases to present the non – anthropocentric concept, but it cannot represent “non – anthropocentrism”.
For example, assume that a game allows players to experience the game from the perspective of an ant, yet the players’ power to act remains similar to that of humans. In this case, it does not truly embody “non – anthropocentrism”.
*Why did I cross out “ecological”?Since affordance itself is a theory in the field of ecology and it can also define which part of design we are studying, the word “ecological” here seems a bit redundant and can be temporarily removed.
At the same time, we decided our main research method: Case analysis.
Select several typical XR ecological projects (high realism vs. high artistic expression; or technology – repair type vs. system – reflection type), and use the affordance map to compare “what can be done by whom / who is prohibited / how the feedback delay is”.
Academic Value:
First, it connects the theory of affordances (possibilities of action), immersive media design, and non – humanist ethical and political issues – this is the current frontier intersection of interdisciplinary research (there is relevant literature but it has not been systematically integrated). It also makes a theoretical integration contribution to the issue of how affordances structurally carry the anthropocentric vs non – anthropocentric stances.
Moreover, this article will have the value of a critical review (critically discussing some XR ecological projects that claim to be “environment – friendly” and “de – anthropocentric” but actually still revolve around human control at the core).
Terms we have broken down:
Affordances theory
Gibson’s original definition is holistic, but in HCI/games/XR research, affordance has been differentiated into multiple dimensions.
In this research question, we mainly select the sub – directions of operational and/or perceptual affordances, because these two concepts are at the core of the affordance theory, most directly reflect anthropocentrism, and are also relatively easy to confine to the research on XR system design (to prevent the scope from expanding to cultural studies, media narrative analysis, etc.).
a. Operational affordances(Game mechanism design)
Core question: What can the user do? → Determine “the allocation of action power”. (Most common in game and XR research)
E.g. Click/move/touch/change the environment/trigger events
b. Perceptual affordances(ecological aesthetic/visual)
Core question: What can the user see/perceive? → Determine “the boundaries of the cognitive framework”.
Whether it is visible/audible/accessible/focusable
E.g. Can it only be viewed from a human perspective?/Is it allowed to switch to a non – human perspective?
Anthropocentric and non – anthropocentric
Interactive immersive media
We focus on immersive XR experiences designed around ecological systems（conclude VR installations、immersive museum exhibits、ecological XR games）
Week 6
This week, I created a new link to classify and store our literature collection and review:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qgCGkZhEyW5FDrYaMFJEbE-2-OdahPZR45fXg6mXYO4/edit?usp=sharing
Week 7
We tested the VR game Moss, and recorded our finding to fill the analysis form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1iRBbNHFWLUYu9ozw0Y_okSWbK4pUDM2JcazuxMFh2AI/edit#responses
Week 8
We tried to test Stray, but one of the difficulties is that Stray wasn’t designed for VR playing initially, which need another mod to help it connect to VR headset. Although we faced some problems connecting at the first, we finally dealt with them and tested the game in headset successfully.
Week 9
写theoretical background