VIRTUALIS has produced demonstrations of ICT tools that facilitate the learning by non-specialist members of society through the “translation” of technical and scientific expertise into formats accessible to and pertinent to interested non-specialists. The products, with a pedagogic mission, permit users to learn through progressive discovery of virtual worlds that are presented — depending on the case — through visual cues such as buildings, maps and landscapes (in 2D and 3D, at multiple scales), leading to portrayals of stakeholders, of the burning public policy and resource management issues, and of “what if scenarios” at the levels of individual and collective action.

A key generic feature of the prototypes is the principle of ‘Progressive Discovery’.

System users are offered, on screen, navigation “pathways” that start from concepts and images that are the very accessible or ‘intuitive’, and then move on (through clicks of the mouse, choices in a menu, etc.) towards forms of information, representation and analysis that are less readily accessible.

A privileged starting point for VIRTUALIS prototypes is the personal scale (water use, energy use, food consumption, farming activity). However, people learn from different ‘starting points’ having different domains of knowledge and widely contrasting preoccupations. So, there will not be only one starting place for “progressive disclosure”. A variety of ‘learning pathways’, “optimal” for different classes of users, may be inter-penetrating and in confounded hierarchies with each other.

A key generic feature of the prototypes is to provide opportunities for dialogue and debates around the images and information encountered by the visitor in the virtual world.

Opportunities are presented for dialogue and discussion about the ‘quality’ of the information provided on an environmental risk or governance issue.

This dialogue may focus on an individual information category (e.g., an indicator or model variable) or a more complex composite object such as a model, a scenario narrative or a map).

It addresses not just scientific quality issues (including incertitude) but also the pertinence of the information for orienting action (individual and collective) in society.

In some of the virtual worlds, these dialogue perspectives are formalised in the format of an opportunity to participate in a multi-stakeholder multi-criteria evaluation of the options facing the individual or the society.

The prototypes demonstrate the revolutionary possibilities opened up by multimedia digital technologies for the future reporting/documentation of scientific work.

The accessing of scientific information opens out to explanations of the data transformations and further towards presentation and discussion of underlying hypotheses, uncertainties, controversies about the scientific knowledge.

Some of the prototypes exploit the ‘confounded hierarchy’ capacities opened up by the digital hyperlink technologies, in order to provide, embedded within the virtual world and as objects/components of this world, a comprehensive documentation of this virtual world (including technical and scientific details) and also of features of the ‘real world’ that, via models, interviews and other research processes, have been exploited for the crafting of the virtual world.

The prototypes demonstrate distinct navigation modes — or ways of “getting around” in a virtual world. These include (with variations):

• A “Wheel Chair Initiation” with a video on automatic pilot;
• A “Guided Visit” with a pre-determined itinerary which is activated step-by-step by the visitor;
• A “Free Visit” allowing exploration of the various ‘functionalities’ without, however, modifying the world;
• A “Participating Visit” in which, as an ‘actor’ in the virtual world, contributions can be made to information sets and to dialogues/interactions with other ‘actors’.

The ‘learning tools’ function in various ways to take the visitor ‘through’ the virtual world and replace her or him back in the ‘real world’. Various mechanisms can be effective for this:

Pedagogic Modules & Links to Educational Resources — The ‘Virtual Library’ functionality is an open-ended feature, and so a virtual world can be a doorway to and from an indefinite spectrum of contextual information in and about the real world, e.g., the integration of the VIVIANE and VGAS systems within teaching programmes and pedagogic resources in relevant domains; catalogues of documents, websites, institutions and persons of interest.

Simultaneous Use and Interaction of Multiple Users — Each of the prototypes (in the four domains: greenhouse gas emissions; freshwater resources; chemical residues from agriculture; marine fisheries) offers, in one way or another, opportunities for simultaneous interaction of several users, as ‘participants’ in the virtual world, who are thus — by design or by circumstances — engaged in a real collective learning process together.

The Social Setting of ICT Learning — Access to the ‘virtual’ learning opportunities can be provided in appropriate ‘real’ situations, e.g., the FISHUALIS system could be installed for use in a fish shop or at a fish market.

Mobile ICT gadgets as information, social networking and learning opportunities — Although VIRTUALIS has focussed mostly on 2D and 3D visualisations with desk-top PC or room-based video-projection, it experimented also with mobile wireless internet links and hand-held screens (e.g., in VWATER, some water resource management issues can be explored via a competitive quiz based game to be played via mobile phones).