IMERSA Day
The Science of Extended Seeing
Immersive Connections to Hyperlocal Data

Virtual event August 27th 10am – 12pm MDT

Immersive experiences in planetarium domes often teleport their audiences to places around Earth, then swiftly head elsewhere in the universe: to worlds in our solar system, to the vast cosmic web of galaxies, and everything in between. This ultimate flight through the cosmos is enabled via scientific visualizations that dynamically scale in space and time, allowing audiences to perceive patterns and change. How do planetariums connect audiences to phenomena at the much smaller human scale?

Our panelists bring decades of experience advancing scientific visualization in planetariums, developing immersive tools to enhance cross-disciplinary collaboration, introducing data collection and analysis to the public in their own communities, and utilizing citizen science to better understand how living beings connect to their environments. This panel will show how immersive spaces can help place the human perspective within a larger context, connecting personal and planetary scales. Using scientific visualizations, data collection, and cross-disciplinary collaborations, planetariums and other immersive venues have become spaces that allow viewers to cultivate environmental awareness from the local to the global, to develop a greater sense of their own agency – a term widely used in human computer interaction, understood here as a strong sense of one’s influence in the environment – and therefore to increase their confidence and ability to affect change.

We promise an exciting deep dive into these subjects. In individual experience, agency is central to informing our actions. Just as aspects of the universe can be adjusted to perceive patterns and change, how do immersive visualizations that reflect local data extend agency? Discover how these audience experiences help us comprehend how our actions influence our communities, our local regions, and our planet as a whole. Such influence may not be perceivable at human temporal and spatial scales, but fortunately immersive visualization tools such as fulldome and VR can reveal the synergy of numerous similar and simultaneous individual actions (good or bad). Explore with us methods that you can apply to enhance the impact our immersive technologies play in facing climate and other environmental change crises. Join us in discussing these and other increasingly significant questions that can help us articulate more vivid experiences within our domes, where we strengthen the understanding of being connected to the time and space of our host planet.