Embodied Digital Twins of the Speulderbos: Lidar Data, 360 Imagery and Game Engines for Understanding and Communicating Environmental Information

By Julia Llort Marin

Abstract
Immersive technologies have the potential to create embodied experiences by means of environments that can have a higher degree of embodiment when compared to conventional communicative methods such as paper-based models.

This thesis project evaluates whether the increased sense of embodiment has a relation to the learning experience and performance of users. We compare the learning experience and performance by dividing the test participants into two groups. One experiencing an immersive environment and the other a web-based document. Both learning environments are informationally equivalent and provide general information about the Speulderbos forest and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data collection by means of an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). At the end of the learning sessions all the participants answer the same survey. The survey includes multiple choice questions about the knowledge acquired in the two learning environments and questions related to the general sense of embodiment.

Both learning environments enhanced the user’s knowledge about the Speulderbos forest and LiDAR collection data. As a result, we could not find a distinctive difference between the two environments regarding knowledge gain. What we did notice is that the level of satisfaction for the users of the immersive experience was higher than the users that tested the conventional method.

With a small sample of users to evaluate, we encourage similar experiences to be researched to develop a better understanding of how the sense of embodiment might influence learning outcomes to communicate environmental information.