Mira Chilli Christensen

With escalating environmental damage to ecosystems, plants, and wildlife, raising environmental awareness has become not just an academic focus but a necessity. New paradigms are needed to foster this awareness, and Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects is one such approach, forming the basis of this paper. Our literature review reveals that this paradigm has rarely been applied in VR applications. We present a virtual reality (VR) experience, Flourish, inspired by hyperobject principles such as interconnectedness, temporal depth, and a non-human perspective, to test their effectiveness in changing users’ self-efficacy regarding climate change and ecosystem preservation. We design the experience using the BehaveFIT framework to address potential psychological barriers. Our results show that Flourish had a short-term positive impact and holds promise as a tool for promoting environmental awareness. We thus believe that the use of hyperobject paradigms with VR can be fruitful and offer options for future, more integrated work.