Connecting Virtual Reality and Ecology: A New Tool to Run Seamless Immersive Experiments in R

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) technology is an emerging tool that is supporting the connection between conservation research and public engagement with environmental issues.The use of VR in ecology consists of interviewing diverse groups of people while they are immersed within a virtual ecosystem to produce better information than more traditional surveys.However,at present,the relatively high level of expertise in specific programming languages and disjoint pathways required to run VR experiments hinder theirwiderapplicationinecologyand other sciences.We present R2VR,a package for implementing and performing VR experiments in R with the aim of easing the learning curve for applied scientists including ecologists. The package provides functions for rendering VR scenes on web browsers with A-Frame that can be viewed by multiple users on smart phones, laptops,and VR headsets.It also provides instructions on how to retrieve answers from an online database in R. Three published ecological case studies are used to illustrate the R2VR workflow,and show how to run a VR experiments and collect the resulting datasets.By tapping into the popularityof Ramongecologists,the R2VR package creates new opportunities to addressthecompl exchallenges associated withconservation,improve scientific knowledge,and promotenewways to share better understanding of environmental issues. The package could also be used in other fields outside of ecology.