Environmental Decision Making with Immersive Technology: The Case Study of Wildfire Management in the Ishi Wilderness

Immersive technologies are fundamentally changing how we analyze, visualize, and communicate scientific data across many disciplines. They are able to help us monitor, understand, communicate, and make decisions about critical elements and changes in ecosystems through place-based experiences allowing for scaffolding and contextualizing data and consequences of decisions against the backdrop of the involved environment-even if that environment is a remote and/or inaccessible location. In our work, we are developing methods for immersive applications that allow for visualizing and analyzing ecosystems and diverse change scenarios in fire prone forests in California and Mexico that include different fire management strategies such as use of managed fire (prescribed, wildfire) and mechanical treatments. As part of this work, we are also investigating the application of immersive storytelling, visualizations, and immersive technology to realize cooperative analysis and decision making, and for scaling the availability of experts by creating digital experiences that can be used jointly via a range of different VR devices. The described immersive experience is based on 360° images for a large number of locations within Ishi Wilderness, a National Park and experimental forest in California. The locations can be selected on an overview map or navigated between via navigation arrows on the ground. Expert audio comments explain the historic developments related to previous wildfires and wildfire management strategies, and the user is visually guided to the parts of the scene explained in the audio comment. The scenes can be complemented by visualizations of past data and consequences of decisions for different scenarios. A communication and synchronization component allows for connecting several instances of the application in a joint session in which one user can guide the other users around and use pointing to refer to and explain parts of the environment. With immersive collaborative decision support systems still in their infancy, this application allows for addressing questions of how effective such systems are, how they should be designed, and how scientific data can be visualized and interacted with within such joint applications.