A rhino at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. AFP/Getty Images
Most of us don’t think about rhinos on a daily basis. We’re too consumed with maintaining inbox-zero or making sure our cat is healthy. When the last male white northern rhino died in March, the impact on most of us was minimal because the now-extinct 2-ton mammal wasn’t lumbering around our living rooms. We’re gravely concerned the moment Mr. Whiskers starts acting funky, though. That’s because he’s a part of our everyday environment and, as such, we’re emotionally attached to him.
This theory is called environmental amnesia. Basically, it’s the belief that we don’t consider what’s going on outside of our immediate surroundings. We think that whatever is happening around us is normal. It’s something that Fountain Digital CEO Svetlana Dragayeva thinks virtual reality can help address by showing people how wondrous our planet’s creatures can be in an intimate setting — their homes.
“This is where technology can really help us shape new types of [emotional] relationships so that we actually become curious about what’s going on in the offline world, and become more involved in saving [it],” she said.
Dragayeva believes that by exposing people to wildlife on a regular basis and leveraging VR’s ability to put us in foreign situations, her BAFTA-winning Virry VR projects can, in a small way, help change the world. Typically, people’s only exposure to wild animals is in a zoo or, for the well-heeled, on a safari. Neither get you close to the animals, however.
,
Source: Engadget