Coordinator:
Martin O'CONNOR

Virtual Visit

The primary objective for the Water Domain’s Virtual Visit (VV) tool is to provide a learning tool and information resource covering the processes, infrastructure, policies and environmental issues involved in catchment-scale water resource management. The tool focuses on abstraction, treatment, distribution and discharge in the context of balancing multiple and possibly competing demands for resources, potentially in the face of uncertainty. The VV is a narrative driven learning tool providing the user with the freedom to construct their own knowledge and learning experience within a well structured environment composed of coherent, meaningful ‘storylines’. The issues of concern are presented in the context of real geographically located ‘stations’ from a particular catchment representing either points (e.g. sewage discharge point) or areas (e.g. a stretch of river or a wetland habitat). Each station ‘contains’ one or more issues (e.g. effect of abstraction on river flows, the concept of an ecological river flow objective) and different stations may contain different elements of the same issue. The catchment and the stations will initially are presented to the user in the form of an interactive digital map of the catchment concerned. The user is able to take an overall introductory catchment-scale tour or focus in on a particular station where an interactive and navigable 3D Virtual Reality world will be used as the medium for learning.

The overall tour provides an introduction to the concepts of water resource management in general and the specific features, history and issues of the study catchment through animating the digital map (highlighting etc.) in combination with audio, images and text where appropriate. At each station multimedia content focussing on both the general conceptual and station-specific components of each issue is available for the user to access. This will take the form of video, on-screen text, audio text, still images and animations. Content relating to a particular issue is linked together using learning goals and questions to provide issue-specific narrative and guidance within a location. The user is prompted to consider water resource management issues (e.g. balancing the needs of agriculture with those of wetlands) and to reflect on what they have learned so far using an on-screen notepad. The user selects one issue at time to explore at a given station based upon some initial interactive multimedia content. However where linkages between issues arise at a station the user is given the chance to change issue and thereby explore the way in which different aspects of water resource management are interdependent e.g. abstraction points, river flows and habitat quality. Opportunity is also be given to the user to jump between stations that present the same / similar issues, again using learning goals and questions as a linking method e.g. where does the water flushed down your toilet go? Options will be presented within each station to exit to the level of the station (choose another issue) or to the whole catchment. An online multimedia help system and dictionary (OMHSAD) is to be be provided with operating instructions and hyperlinks to concepts and terms. It should be noted however that online help & guidance will be present throughout the VV’s content.