Visualization of climate change in situ

Abstract

As the critical challenges of climate change escalate, the need to disseminate essential information about the situation increases. Climate change discourse, however, tends to be general and global, as well as scientific and abstract. Arguments are growing for localized and affective communicational solutions. The present paper addresses this issue by means of situated simulation, a form of indirect augmented reality. We describe the core idea of a simulation application that visualizes climate change based on online data sets for vegetation and terrain, present two current prototypes and completed `apps' and their evaluation, as well as comparing this solution to the state of art in climate change visualization. We suggest there is considerable room for further use of indirect augmented reality in communicating matters of climate change, pedagogically and publicly, temporally and on site.