Immersive learning experiences for understanding complex systems

Abstract

Complexity is core part of our lives. Aware or not, people need to understand and communicate complex ideas and perspectives. Understanding and communicating complexity can be facilitated through interactive simulations. Doing so in the physical world is often impractical, however. Users and developers are overloaded with information and ambiguity, costs are prohibitive, and unsupervised physical simulations raise safety concerns. Novel immersive technology might hold the key to transforming how we tackle understanding and communicating complexity. In this position paper, we propose empowering user agency and perception to take part in complex learning experiences and create their own, combining two factors: enhanced visual and spatial context provided by location-awareness, immersive environments, and somatic, embodied agency; and enhanced cultural and social context by leveraging as input methods the rich semantics of cultural-social gestures and rituals. To deem the feasibility of this argument, we propose developing two culture-aware prototypes, one for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana, United States, and another for a Western Europe cultural context.