Using VR in Sea Level Rise Planning and Community Engagement

Virtual Reality is being used more and more for data visualizations in many fields. The City of Santa Cruz City Manager’s office is exploring using VR for increasing community engagement in their Climate Action Program. Read about it here: https://bit.ly/2xW7rzQ
The climate action program has identified Milestones in order to reach their Greenhouse Gas Reduction Goal:
Reduce community-wide greenhouse gas emissions 30% by 2020 and 80% by 2050 (compared to 1990 levels).

As coastal communities worldwide contend with sea level rise, coastal erosion, and other impacts of climate change, a critical piece of the puzzle has become educating stakeholders in highly creative, insightful and practical ways. In a partnership with The City of Santa Cruz, Virtual Planet Technologies produced a multi-media, interactive VR application to help communities better understand the impacts of climate change as well as explore emerging adaptation solutions. Attendees will have an opportunity to experience their Sea Level Rise Explorer VR experience.

Join us for demos and discussion of the Climate Action Program, their use of VR in community engagement, and Virtual Planet Technologies's experience. There will be demos of this experience and more at the Meetup.

Our guests are:
Tiffany Wise-West, PE, LEED AP, PhD
Sustainability & Climate Action Manager for the City of Santa Cruz.

Dr. Juliano Calil, senior research fellow at the Center for the Blue Economy, Adjunct Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and co-founder of Virtual Planet Technologies. https://virtualplanet.tech

As usual our format is:
6:30 pm doors open with demos and maybe some pizza/snacks (donations happily accepted)
7:00 Community Announcements
7:15 Presentations
8:30 Demos, networking, cold pizza
9:30 Santa Cruz sidewalks are rolled up