One of the greatest challenges faced by humanity is climate change, which has already led to dramatic consequences for the environment (e.g., sea ice and mountain glaciers are melting, wildlife populations and habitats are changing, extreme weather conditions are becoming more frequent). Climate change is caused by increased emissions of greenhouse gases (Pachauri et al., 2014). In order to counteract climate change it is therefore important to make people aware of the origins of climate change and to alter their attitudes and behavior. However, this endeavor has turned out to be challenging, and people’s level of concern does not appropriately reflect the scope of the problem (Carmichael and Brulle, 2017).

One source of the problem is that climate change is a relatively abstract phenomenon, in the sense that the effects of greenhouse gas emissions are not immediately visible but take place over many years (temporal distance), and the consequences do not necessarily occur at the same place as the causing behavior (spatial distance). Temporal and spatial distance can - at least partially - explain why it is so hard to bring this issue into awareness to the extent that it changes behavior in a sustainable manner (Trope and Liberman, 2010). Using traditional media such as films or illustrated brochures can be used to explain the mechanisms of climate change and visualize its consequences. However, providing an immersive realistic experience of the consequences of climate change may have additional psychological effects that increase environmental awareness, as elaborated next.

Researchers and media developers are now able to create rich computer-generated 3D environments that enable participants to experience virtual environments as if they were real (Gonçalves et al., 2022). Immersive VR is typically experienced using a head-mounted display that digitally recreates user’s movements in their physical space and creates depth perception by rendering a different image for each eye. Compared to conventional computer screens, head mounted displays shut out the outside world, and typically occupy a larger part of the field of view and have a larger field of regard, allowing users to experience an illusory sense of presence in the three-dimensional virtual world. Immersive VR thus enables a direct personal and embodied experience of climate change consequences that may bring participants psychologically closer to the issue when compared to simply watching a video (Markowitz et al., 2018; Markowitz and Bailenson, 2021). In particular, immersive VR can be used to visualize effects of climate change that can otherwise not be experienced directly due to large time spans (e.g., glacier melting) in a realistic way. Thus, the immersive experience can impact both the cognitive and affective processing of climate change. At the cognitive level, it might help users to establish a mental representation of the mechanisms that underlie climate change and its consequences. This, in turn, may raise the awareness of the risks associated with climate change (Ahn S. J. et al., 2014a; Kim, 2020). At the affective level, it can enhance the sense of being related and emotionally connected to the environment, thus making climate change a personally relevant matter (Akerlof et al., 2013; Ahn S. J. et al., 2014a).

While the potential of immersive VR as a persuasive tool (i.e., as means to change attitudes or behaviors; see Wienrich et al., 2021) has been recognized in other domains such as prejudice (Peck et al., 2013; Hasler et al., 2017), empathy (van Loon et al., 2018), or human rights (Bujić et al., 2020), its effect on environmental attitudes has not yet been extensively studied. Most previous studies using immersive VR in the context of climate change have focused on knowledge transfer (Markowitz and Bailenson, 2021). Nevertheless, there is some evidence that immersive VR can increase environmental awareness and pro-environmental behavior (Ahn S. J. et al., 2014a; Hsu et al., 2018; Markowitz et al., 2018; Fauville et al., 2020; Petersen et al., 2020; Chirico et al., 2021). For example, a visualization of the tree-cutting process had an impact on paper conservation (Ahn S. J. et al., 2014a), an underwater world helped to demonstrate the impact of rising seawater (Markowitz et al., 2018), or a landscape of Greenland served to illustrate the melting ice sheet (Petersen et al., 2020). Although these studies provide promising results, several crucial questions remain open. First, most of these results are based on a comparison of environmental awareness before and after exposure to immersive VR, without comparing the effects to a non-immersive control condition (Hsu et al., 2018; Markowitz et al., 2018; Petersen et al., 2020; Chirico et al., 2021). One of the studies that did make such a comparison found that watching a nature video through a head-mounted display (immersive technology) enhanced nature relatedness, but not to a higher extent than watching the same content on a conventional computer monitor (Soliman et al., 2017). Moreover, in the context of learning, it has been shown that high immersion does not always improve learning, and it has been suggested that there are also distracting effects of immersion on cognitive processing (e.g., attending to irrelevant information; Craig et al., 2002; Cummings and Bailenson, 2016; Makransky et al., 2019; Mania and Chalmers, 2001; Mayer, 2014; Pollard et al., 2020). Thus, it remains an open question to what extent immersive VR is more effective at increasing environmental awareness compared to traditional communication media (e.g., text, 2D desktop demonstration).

Furthermore, there is often no manipulation of design aspects within immersive VR. When setting up an immersive VR environment, VR designers are confronted with numerous decisions about the specific VR design, such as the degree of visual realism (i.e., how graphically realistic the virtual environment is), the level of interactivity with the virtual world, or the use of avatars. From the developers’ perspective, it would be important to know which of the various aspects of a VR environment contribute most to the positive effects on attitude change. Previous studies have shown that visual realism is an important determinant of presence (IJsselsteijn et al., 2001; Schubert et al., 2001; Baños et al., 2004; Hvass et al., 2017; Weber et al., 2021). Presence refers to the subjective feeling of being in the virtual world (Slater and Wilbur, 1997). For example, in scenarios designed for participants with fear of height or other anxieties, more visual realism resulted in increased presence and affective responses (Hvass, 2018; Gromer et al., 2019). Increased presence is also associated with enhanced interest and personal involvement in immersive VR experiences (Makransky and Petersen, 2021). Based on these results, it can be hypothesized that immersive VR is most effective with high levels of visual realism. However, the role of visual realism in increasing environmental awareness is largely unexplored (Weber et al., 2021). There is some evidence in the context of learning that visual realism is not the most important factor: Rather, it seems more important that virtual representations are authentic, coherent, plausible, and functionally correspond to the applied context (Witmer and Singer, 1998; Hamstra et al., 2014; Jacobson, 2017).

Manipulating visual realism within immersive VR can serve as a more fine-tuned means of increasing (or reducing) the sense of presence. We therefore argue that such a manipulation helps to better understand the complex interrelationship between immersion, presence, and attitude change beyond simple comparisons between media (immersive VR vs. non-VR). In addition to these considerations, the focus on visual realism as a design aspect is also relevant from a practical perspective. Inspired by ever-improving technology, there is a tendency to strive for the highest possible degree of visual realism when developing immersive VR (Bowman and McMahan, 2007; Hvass et al., 2017; Erolin et al., 2019). Remarkably, this design choice significantly impacts development costs: To increase visual realism, 3D modellers and developers may have to invest hundreds of working hours. Creating less realistic but visually coherent and authentic environments could emphasize the focus on educational practices, which in turn could achieve equal or even better effects. While the pursuit of photorealistic graphics may be the standard for most gaming applications, the role of visual realism for other immersive VR goals, such as increasing environmental awareness, will need to be thoroughly explored in order to create efficient immersive VR applications.

Another limitation of previous studies is that they have mostly relied on explicit measurements of environmental attitudes. In such measures, participants typically rate their agreement with certain environment-related statements on a predefined scale (e.g., likert scale ranging from 1–5; Ahn et al., 2014a; Ahn et al., 2014b; Markowitz et al., 2018; Petersen et al., 2020) ¹ . In the indirect measurement, they counted how many napkins participants used to help clean up spilled water. Such an approach can be prone to social desirability or expectancy effects (Beattie and Sale, 2011). For example, people want to present themselves “greener” than they actually are (Beattie and McGuire, 2012), or they adapt their responses because they think that an increase in environmental awareness is expected from them after the virtual intervention. Such biases can lead to misleading results, especially when changes in questionnaire scores are not compared to a non-VR control condition. Moreover, attitudes have explicit and implicit components, both of which can influence behavior (Wilson et al., 2000; Evans, 2008). Thus, explicit measures alone may not be sufficient to assess the success of immersive VR in changing attitudes (Beattie and McGuire, 2012).

The aim of the present study is to explore the effectiveness of an immersive VR experience in increasing climate change awareness and environmental attitudes. In doing so, we aim to take into consideration some of the limitations of previous research outlined above, including (1) comparing immersive VR to non-VR interventions, (2) manipulating the design aspect of visual realism within the immersive VR experience, and (3) incorporating implicit measurements of environmental attitudes. To this end, we created different visualisations of the Aletsch glacier to represent the negative effect of climate change. The Aletsch glacier is the largest and best known glacier in Switzerland and is featured in many newspaper articles about climate change as the glacier is expected to shrink substantially within the next 80–100 years (Jouvet et al., 2011; Linsbauer et al., 2012). By demonstrating the effects of climate change via melting glaciers, and by simulating many years in a duration of only a few minutes, we aimed to make the invisible effects of climate change visible and directly tangible to the participants. Importantly, we created different virtual environments (VE), all showing the same narrated sequence of the Aletsch glacier melting but with different degrees of visual realism. Visual realism was varied by manipulating the parameters of texture resolution and repetition, glacier topography, atmospheric perspective and color adjustments (cf. methods). By manipulating these parameters, three conditions were created: a well-designed abstract condition, a well-designed realistic condition, and a less sophisticated realistic condition (see Figure 1).

Due to the reduced psychological distance (in space and time) to climate change consequences during the immersive VR experience (Trope and Liberman, 2010), we expected that the immersive VR experience would increase climate change awareness and environmental attitudes. Specifically, we expected these changes to be stronger in the immersive VR conditions compared to three non-VR control conditions (watching a video of the virtual application, reading a text with screenshots of the virtual application, or just reading a text). Within the immersive VR conditions, we expected that the well-designed realistic condition would lead to the highest levels of presence and therefore would have the strongest impact on climate change awareness and environmental attitudes. Finally, we supplemented well-established explicit measurements (new environmental paradigm, climate change scepticism, and nature relatedness) with a self-created version of an implicit association test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998) to measure environmental attitudes. The IAT uses response times in binary classification tasks to measure implicit attitudes toward concepts. The responses are facilitated when a target concept (e.g., “environmentally-friendly”) and a matching affective concept (e.g., “pleasant”) are allocated to the same response key (Schultz et al., 2004; Wang et al., 2019). IATs have been criticized (Mierke and Klauer, 2003; Rothermund and Wentura, 2004) but have nevertheless often been shown to be sensitive to cognitive interventions (Friese et al., 2006; Slabbinck et al., 2011; Rihs et al., 2022). For example, Beattie and McGuire (2012) found that the IAT measurement of implicit attitude toward low (vs. high) carbon footprint products, but not an explicit measurement of the same issue, was associated with an attentional focus toward negative images of climate change. We therefore expected to find effects of the immersive VR interventions on the implicit measure.

The aim of this study was to examine whether an immersive experience of climate change consequences in VR increases climate change awareness. The visualization showed in time lapse how the Swiss Aletsch glacier melts over a period of 220 years. Thus, by providing an embodied experience that overcomes the temporal distance of climate change consequences, we expected a stronger impact of the immersive VR experience when compared to less immersive 2D control conditions. Indeed, participants experienced the VR conditions as being more exciting and enjoyable, and they had a higher sense of presence when compared to the control conditions. This confirms the general usefulness of VR interventions to convey pro-environmental messages. Across all conditions, environmental awareness (as measured by NEP) increased after the intervention. This indicates that glacier melting is well suited to illustrate climate change and that it affects peoples’ attitudes towards it. Not only is glacier melting compelling evidence of global warming, it can also serve as a symbol of climate change showing how dramatic changes of climate are affecting our environment. Our results show that confronting people with this phenomenon can positively influence environmental awareness. Although the change in NEP did not differ between immersive VR and the control conditions (non-significant time:type interaction), the increase in environmental awareness was only significant for the VR conditions, while there was no change for the control conditions. While a straight-forward interpretation is not possible, we think that this result is of interest in light of a number of previous studies that have shown that virtual realities have persuasive potential because they are immersive and thus enable a presence experience (e.g., Weibel et al., 2011; Weibel and Wissmath, 2011; Makransky and Petersen, 2021). Because presence was higher in the VR conditions when compared to the control conditions (i.e. the video condition), it may be that presence accounts for at least part of the increased environmental awareness. We therefore interpret these results in favour of the potential of immersive VR in increasing climate change awareness (Ahn S. J. et al., 2014a; Hsu et al., 2018; Markowitz et al., 2018; Fauville et al., 2020; Petersen et al., 2020; Chirico et al., 2021).

Since presence can contribute to something not only being comprehended but actually experienced (cf. Weber et al., 2021, or Tussyadiah et al., 2018, in the field of tourism), it can be assumed that this very fact provides a benefit in the VR conditions and distinguishes VR from the other conditions. In this sense, Wirth et al. (2007), for example, assumes that presence is an “amplifier of media effects” (p. 519).

We also expected a stronger increase in nature relatedness for immersive VR (vs. control). There was no overall increase in nature relatedness across all conditions, although there was a trend for an increase exclusively in the VR conditions. The absence of a clear effect of VR on nature relatedness is in line with other recent studies (Soliman et al., 2017; Spangenberger et al., 2022). For example, Spangenberger et al. used VR to “embody” participants with a tree (participants could do small branch movements with their arms). They found that the increased level of immersion in VR, when compared to a video watching control condition, did not translate into stronger effects on nature relatedness. These and our own results suggest that nature relatedness may be difficult to modulate with short-time interventions, particularly when using traditional media. As pointed out by others, interactivity with the environment and movements of the person’s own body resembling the virtual body when interacting with the environment may be important factors in increasing nature relatedness, which was not the case in the present study (Ahn et al., 2016; Spangenberger et al., 2022).

In a similar vein, there was no change in climate change scepticism (CCS). The absence of an effect on this measure might not be surprising because of a floor effect: Values were already very low for the vast majority of participants before the interventions (M = 1.5 on a scale from 1–5), leaving less room for changes to even lower scores after the respective intervention. Moreover, people who are sceptic about climate change may not be prone to changing their minds as a result of interventions since their firm opinion may be related to stable traits and political/ideological orientations (McCright et al., 2016; Trémolière and Djeriouat, 2021). In addition to these established measurements, we introduced an implicit measurement of pro-environmental attitudes (Implicit Association Test - IAT) in this study. There was no effect across all conditions and within each condition separately (VR vs. control) on the IAT score. Noteworthy, in a previous study, it has been found that the IAT score decreased in both an active and passive control condition from the first to the second measurement, suggesting that there might be an intervention-independent decrease in IAT effects due to practice (Rihs et al., 2022). In this regard, not the absolute change but rather the relative change between conditions might be relevant, and there was indeed a trend for a differential change in the IAT score in this study (increase for VR vs. decrease for control). This pattern of results may indicate that the VR, but not the control conditions, counteracted the decrease in the IAT score due to repeated measurement. Thus, although the present results do not allow to draw any firm conclusions, they nevertheless point to a possible value of using implicit measurements for the evaluation of the effectiveness of VR interventions on attitude change.

Another aim of the present study was to explore whether specific VR design choices with regard to visual realism would affect climate change awareness. Therefore, we varied the degree of visual realism and sophistication of the VR environment and compared an abstract and two realistic depictions of the Aletsch glacier melting. The results show that our manipulations did work in the intended way: The sophisticated realistic environment was perceived as the most realistic, the abstract environment was perceived as least realistic. Crucially, we found no evidence that realism in VR depictions favours presence or any of the environmental measurements. The only hint that we found was that environmental awareness (NEP) only increased for the well-designed abstract and realistic condition, but not for the less sophisticated realistic conditions. This result should be taken with caution, however, because baseline values before VR exposure in the real-condition were higher than in the other two conditions, whereas values after the intervention were similar. Our results suggest that visual realism per se does not necessarily foster changes in attitudes. This has important implications. New consumers of VR experiences base their expectations regarding visual fidelity on high-end graphics in the gaming industry. However, it is expensive and time-intensive to create high visual realism and budgets for non-profit and educational applications are usually multiple orders of magnitude smaller when compared to the gaming industry. We show that a less sophisticated and less realistic, but visually coherent and authentic environment (the abstract condition) exerts the same positive impact on climate change awareness as the realistic environments (real- and real +). This is consistent with previous studies that indicate, on the one hand, that authenticity, coherence, and functionality of virtual environments are as important or even more important than realism in achieving the desired effect (Witmer and Singer, 1998; Hamstra et al., 2014; Jacobson, 2017) and that, on the other hand, cartoon-like visualizations can have the same effect as realistic ones (Huang, 2021). Our findings provide practitioners in the field of environmental VR with an argument to shift scarce resources from the realistic visual reconstruction to other aspects of production like coherence, both in regards to look and content. Which of the various other aspects of VR design ultimately influence attitude changes needs to be investigated in future studies.

A few limitations should be considered. First of all, various subjective decisions were made in the design of the VR environments. We therefore cannot conclusively state that visual realism plays no role in terms of presence or attitude change. It is possible that our well designed and realistic condition was not realistic enough or that the design of the less realistic condition (real-) was still too well designed to induce differences in experiential effects between the environments. Furthermore, we explored the effect of visual realism in a specific context (glacier melting, attitude change), which limits the generalizability of our results to other contexts (e.g., learning about climate change). Moreover, the implicit measurement that we developed in this study (IAT) can be regarded as a promising starting point, but more effort is required to develop and validate such implicit measurements.

Further, our sample size was not representative of the general population. Consequently, there was limited variance in some of our measurements, which might have reduced the probability of finding a change due to the VR interventions (see discussion above). In a similar vein, our sample size was rather small, so that possible moderating variables for the effect of the VR intervention on environmental awareness could not be assessed. For example, Sajjadi et al. (2022) found that serious games about system thinking had the strongest effects on pro-environmental attitudes for those participants with less past science education. Future studies should take such variables into account.

The measurements that were used in this study were limited to attitudes toward climate change and towards the environment. When using VR as a persuasive tool to counteract climate change, it would be promising for future research to also measure real (or at least hypothetical) pro-environmental behaviour (Deringer and Hanley, 2021). Moreover, future VR experiences could be more interactive and may for example allow participants to learn more about actions they can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pro-environmental behaviour. This concurs with recent claims that effective climate change interventions should also focus on solutions rather than solely highlight impacts (Markowitz et al., 2014). In addition, future studies could include other indirect methods of measuring environmental attitudes besides the IAT, which might have a more direct behavioral link. One possibility would be to incorporate the concept of System Thinking. According to Arnold and Wade (2015) systems thinking involves synergistic and analytical skills to identify and understand different components of a system as well as their causal relationships. Lezak and Thibodeau (2016) were able to show that systems thinkers tend to support policies on climate change. Sajjadi et al. (2022) could show that a learning experience can increase systems thinking and that systems thinking in turn leads to policy support regarding measures concerning food-energy-water nexus. The authors have developed an interesting method to indirectly measure system thinking by assessing different scenarios and their impacts. We consider it promising to use this method in future studies similar to ours.

It should be clear that interventions such as the one assessed in this study cannot solve current climate change problems. Exploring means to increase environmental awareness is a step into the right direction, but an urgent change in societal attitudes and behavioural adaptations at the institutional and personal levels are required. In the future, immersive VR applications might not only be used to visualize climate change consequences, but maybe also to increase the awareness of planetary limits, energy limits, and other contents that fosters the critical reflection of consumption behaviour and economic growth (Nardi et al., 2018).

According to various experts, glacier melt is the most tangible manifestation of climate change, as it can impressively demonstrate its effects (e.g., Price, 2009; Carey, 2010; Jackson, 2015). In our study, we were able to show that the visualization of glacier melt can have an influence on our attitude. However, it should be mentioned that melting glaciers do not have a direct impact on our personal lives unlike, for example, heat waves or floods. Accordingly, Whitmarsh (2008) was able to show that personal experience of air pollution influences perceptions and behaviors related to climate change. Future studies could therefore draw on visualizations that show more drastic consequences of climate change. It is possible that these would have an even stronger impact on attitudes.

To conclude, this study shows that climate change consequences can successfully be visualized in immersive VR, and that such visualizations have the potential to change climate change awareness, although the results need to be replicated and extended with a larger and more diverse sample and validated implicit measurements. The comparisons between immersive VR and the control conditions showed a nuanced picture, with more similarities than differences, highlighting that media comparison is an important step for a critical assessment of the effectiveness of immersive VR interventions.