Who Fears the Big Bad Climate Change? Analysis of Emotional Reactions to Global Warming in Virtual Reality

Climate change is one of the most challenging issues of our times, but it seems that humanity does not always realize the kind of consequences our current everyday habits will have on our planet. Virtual Reality is a powerful technology that can provide a wide range of immersive experiences, including representations of circumstances that can be far in space and in time. The current work presents a virtual reality futuristic depiction of the city of Torino, in Italy, that includes the scary representation of some of the effects of climate change on nature, people, and urban assets. We run a user study to measure the positive and negative emotions induced by these audio-visual effects, and found that the ones related to nature have the highest negative emotional impact.