Building Community Resiliency through Immersive Communal Extended Reality (CXR)

Situated and shared experiences can motivate community members to plan action, promoting engagement. We deployed evaluated a communal extended-reality (CXR) bus tour that depicts the possible impacts of flooding climate change. This paper describes results seven engagement sessions with total N = 74 Roosevelt Island community. conducted pre- post-bus focus groups understand how affected these members’ awareness motivation take action. found unique qualities immersive, situated, geo-located virtual reality (VR) on made change feel real, brought consequences closer home, highlighted existing resources address issue. Our showed CXR experience helped simulate physical emergency state, which empowered translate feelings hopelessness into creative actionable ideas. finding exemplifies VR be powerful tool innovations collective work is first-of-its-kind empirical contribution showing inspire It offers proof-of-concept large-scale process featuring simulated experiences, leading ideas for bottom-up resiliency plan.