Daejeon, July 27–31
Despite decades of environmental education, a persistent "knowledge–action gap" remains: many people understand environmental crises, yet such knowledge often remains detached from everyday place, responsibility, and social relation. The “Overview Effect”—awe and self-transcendent feelings reported by astronauts viewing Earth from space (White 1987; Yaden et al. 2016)—and related constructs such as Identification With All Humanity (IWAH; McFarland et al. 2012) have been proposed as possible pathways for expanding planetary awareness. However, a purely panoramic viewpoint has limitations: awe can be intense yet short-lived without social scaffolding; “global” representations can flatten local life-worlds and culturally situated meanings; and abstract planetary imagery alone does not necessarily make environmental issues feel personally meaningful within everyday constraints.
This paper proposes the Second-Phase Global Perspective Protocol (SPGP): a reusable intervention design integrating (i) co-created immersive VR modules grounded in distinct environmental worlds, (ii) shared narrative through locally meaningful stories, sounds, practices, and memories, and (iii) structured, facilitated dialogue anchored by an Earth-from-space segment. Rather than treating behavioral change as an immediate outcome of a single VR experience, this paper examines how immersive and dialogic encounters with different environmental worlds may cultivate perceived planetary continuity and self-relevance—relational conditions that can support longer-term environmental engagement.
Prior work suggests that immersive virtual environments can influence environmental locus of control and related pro-environmental orientations (Ahn et al. 2014). At the same time, recent studies indicate that VR-based overview-effect experiences do not automatically produce measurable pro-environmental behavior (van Horen et al. 2024), and systematic review evidence suggests that immersive virtual nature may support nature connectedness while the evidence remains limited and mixed (Brambilla et al. 2024). SPGP therefore operationalizes “global perspective” not as a single universal viewpoint, but as movement between situated worlds. Its aim is reciprocal locality: participants encounter other communities’ environments and meanings, then re-situate their own relationships to Earth through guided reflection, comparison, and dialogue. These relational shifts are treated as proximal mechanisms through which the knowledge–action gap may be narrowed.
SPGP treats VR not as spectacle, but as a bridge between environmental worlds. Drawing on contact hypothesis (Allport 1954; Pettigrew / Tropp 2006), meaningful engagement is more likely when interaction is supported by cooperative framing, shared goals, and an enabling context. Rather than assuming empathy emerges automatically from exposure to difference, SPGP explicitly designs for structured contact: participants are guided to (1) describe what they noticed, (2) articulate what surprised them and what questions emerged, and (3) relate these observations to their own lived environment and responsibilities.
SPGP also treats VR as a medium for shared narrative rather than visual simulation alone. By embedding locally meaningful stories, sounds, practices, memories, and environmental relations within immersive environments, the protocol allows participants to encounter how communities narrate their relationships with their surroundings. Such story-mediated encounters can generate questions, comparisons, and first-person reflections that support perceived planetary continuity and self-relevance.
Finally, SPGP treats immersion as a temporary liminal space (Turner 1969) that loosens habitual assumptions enough to make new interpretations discussable—without replacing local attachments with abstract moralizing. The protocol therefore does not seek to dissolve difference into a generalized planetary identity. Instead, it asks whether difference can be held together with continuity: whether participants can perceive distant environmental worlds as distinct, yet not unrelated to their own places and lives.
As shown in Figure 1, SPGP shifts the global perspective from a single overview from space to a dialogic traversal among situated environmental worlds.
Figure 1. Basic structure of the Second-Phase Global Perspective (SPGP) protocol.
SPGP is organized as a reusable protocol across sites and participant groups:
T0 (Pre-session): Participants complete brief baseline measures of place-related attachment, perceived planetary continuity, self-relevance, psychological distance, and environmental concern, alongside a short description of their everyday relationship with nature. Facilitators introduce session goals and norms for respectful intercultural dialogue.
Phase 1 (Co-created local VR): Participants encounter VR modules co-created with communities from another site, such as a coral island, tropical rainforest, or desert/astronomy region. Modules combine 360° video and/or 3D-captured environments with locally meaningful scenes, soundscapes, and curated narratives. The design foregrounds what the community wants to show, prioritizing situated knowledge over external explanation.
Phase 2 (Immersion in other environmental worlds): Participants experience another community’s environmental world through immersive media. The goal is not simply to observe an unfamiliar place, but to enter a situated narrative that can prompt recognition, surprise, comparison, and inquiry.
Phase 3 (Earth-view anchor): Participants view an Earth-from-space segment, such as ISS-like imagery. Rather than functioning as a moralizing finale, this segment acts as a cognitive and affective anchor that links encountered local worlds to a shared planetary frame.
Phase 4 (Structured dialogue): Facilitators guide discussion using prompts that move from observation (“What did you notice?”) to interpretation (“What surprised you or raised questions?”) to self-relation (“What does this change in how you see your own environment?”). The dialogue does not ask participants to declare immediate behavioral commitments. Instead, it elicits questions, comparisons, and first-person reflections that indicate whether distant environmental worlds are becoming personally meaningful.
T1–T3 (Follow-ups): Short follow-up prompts, such as one week and one month after the session, capture whether questions, conversations, memories, or small forms of inquiry persisted. Evaluation focuses on perceived planetary continuity, self-relevance, psychological distance, and the emergence of questions, comparisons, and first-person reflections during dialogue. These indicators are assessed through adapted brief measures, including items informed by IWAH (McFarland et al. 2012) and awe/self-transcendence research (Yaden et al. 2016), together with qualitative coding of dialogue transcripts and reflective writing.
SPGP produces mixed, small-scale datasets suitable for interpretive digital humanities analysis: dialogue transcripts, reflective writing, facilitator notes, brief measures, and annotated media. This combination enables comparison across sites while preserving the specificity of local narratives and small data.
SPGP is being developed across three contrasting field contexts: a coral reef island in Japan (Kikai Island), rainforest communities in Cameroon, and a desert/astronomy region in Atacama, Chile. These sites were selected not as representative samples, but as sharply contrasting environmental worlds through which the protocol can examine how reciprocal locality may be cultivated through cross-site VR exposure, shared narrative, Earth-view anchoring, and structured dialogue. Co-creation processes include collaborative filming, scene selection with local partners, and iterative review of what is appropriate to record and share.
Preliminary observations suggest distinctive mechanisms. In Cameroon, participants viewing Kikai Island VR identified vegetation resembling familiar forest trees and expressed joy at this unexpected similarity. They also generated new questions when encountering unfamiliar coastal dynamics, asking how waves and landforms are produced. This indicates that VR can stimulate inquiry rather than passive consumption. Several participants reported limited everyday use of 2D maps and difficulty forming spatial images of distant regions; after immersive VR, participants described being able to recognize a distant environment “in three dimensions,” and when a map was shown immediately afterwards, they reported understanding its meaning more intuitively. This sequence suggests that VR can expand perceptual frameworks and create bridges to other representational forms, supporting learning beyond the VR experience itself.
In Kikai Island fieldwork, residents often describe the island as “alive,” and ritual and cooperative gatherings reinforce a strong sense of continuity and mutual support. Encounters with coral spawning and other expressions of vitality provide culturally rich resources for grounded connectedness. Such features are not merely content to archive; they shape how Earth-view imagery and dialogue prompts are interpreted, supporting engagement that respects local cosmologies rather than replacing them.
At the time of this camera-ready revision, Atacama fieldwork is being extended to document desert landscapes, water relations, night-sky narratives, and local interpretations of astronomy, tourism, and environmental change. This third site is important because it connects ground-based desert life with a cosmic perspective, allowing SPGP to ask how astronomical and planetary imaginaries are brought back into relation with land, water, culture, and everyday life.
Across sites, SPGP follows locally negotiated protocols for consent, circulation, and community control over sensitive materials. This aligns the project’s “remembering” practices with principles of Indigenous and local data sovereignty. It also positions digital media not only as a tool for representation, but as a site of negotiation over what may be shared, how, and with whom.
SPGP contributes to digital humanities by offering a reusable protocol that integrates participatory media-making, shared narrative, small-data interpretation, and structured dialogue for environmental engagement. It aligns with DH2026’s theme of “Engagement” through multi-layered participation: community co-creation, intercultural encounter, facilitated reflection, and reciprocal interpretation. It also resonates with “Remembering” through respectful activation of situated knowledge, and with “Annotating | Small Data” through mixed-method analysis that remains open to interpretation.
The paper’s central contribution is to reframe global perspective as relational traversal rather than panoramic overview. SPGP does not assume that immersive media alone produces environmental action. Instead, it examines how co-created VR environments, shared stories, Earth-view anchoring, and structured dialogue may cultivate perceived planetary continuity and self-relevance. A cross-site dialogue experiment scheduled for October 2026 will provide the first comparative evaluation of SPGP across all three field sites, with follow-ups examining how perceived planetary continuity, self-relevance, and dialogic meaning-making persist over time. Ongoing work will refine cross-site deployment and evaluation, aiming to articulate how reciprocal locality can become a practical design principle for participatory digital museums and environmental humanities interventions.