Designing a mixed-initiative multi-user VR interface for wildfire mitigation

Wildfires in California are increasing in severity and frequency due to climate change. In collaboration with civil engineering researchers in the Soga Group at UC Berkeley, we are designing multi-user VR applications so groups of stakeholders can navigate simulations and datasets related to mitigating harm from wildfires. In the above image, we tested an object detection tool's capability for identifying vegetation, a component of modeling wildfire spread. Contributors to the report from the SET Lab are Samir Ghosh, Anthony Angeles, Andrew Moskovich, and Katherine Isbister. From the Soga Group are Yanglan Wang, Kecheng Chen, and Kenichi Soga. This report was accepted as a workshop paper to CHI ’23: HCI for Climate Change Imagining Sustainable Futures, April 28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany