VR headset provides immersive learning experience about the dangers, wonders of thunderstorms.
Generally, University of Maryland atmospheric scientist Guangyang Fang would advise you not to walk out into a violent thunderstorm. These days, though, he's encouraging people to go look for that lightning strike-but only in virtual reality.
Fang recently released Faraday Lightning Safety, a mixed-reality game available for free at the Meta Store that might represent the future of geoscience education. The brief game demonstrates how the "Faraday cage effect"-a phenomenon where an enclosed conductive structure shields its interior from external electric fields by redistributing charges and blocking electromagnetic waves-can protect people from lightning during a thunderstorm.
"Instead of just looking at a diagram or reading an explanation, virtual reality and mixed reality let you step inside a concept," said Fang, a visiting assistant research scientist at UMD's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center currently researching lightning detection and physics. "You can walk around a thunderstorm, see lightning strikes in real time, view everything from a top-down omniscient perspective, and immediately understand how protection works, which is tough to achieve with traditional methods."
In the game, players of all ages can guide Spark, a cute virtual owl, to safety by moving it to various locations like a car, beach or house. As lightning strikes, Spark reacts accordingly-jumping joyfully if protected by the Faraday cage effect or fainting momentarily if zapped.
Fang came up with the idea for the game after watching news reports about an August 2022 lightning strike that left three people dead near the White House. A visit last week to test the game at College Park Academy, a public charter school launched with support from the University of Maryland and located in UMD's Discovery District, helped confirm his team is on the right track, he said.
"In our field, we know all about this kind of safety, but I realized the average person does not," he said. "When we went to College Park Academy, many of the students said they didn't know how to protect themselves until they played the game.
The game merges the real world with Spark's virtual environment through mixed reality, leveraging the Meta Quest 3 headset's advanced spatial computing capabilities to project gameplay onto a virtual tabletop visible in the room where the player is. This approach creates an intuitive and comfortable experience for newcomers to immersive technology while encouraging engagement from spectators.
"Virtual and mixed reality has the incredible ability to make abstract concepts feel real," Fang said. "When it comes to something like lightning safety, it's one thing to read about it, but it's another to experience it firsthand."
Fang and his development team, which includes Department of Computer Science student interns Damian Figueroa and Samuel Wiggins, envision Faraday Lightning Safety as a glimpse into how students around the world will learn complex scientific concepts in the future-and enjoy it. The team plans to expand their work, developing more educational experiences on geoscience topics such as the water cycle and lightning classification.
In addition to this game's release, the team has launched the XR @ CISESS website to showcase its immersive technology projects, such as the Terrality weather/climate data visualization app and the Virtual Proving Ground and Training Center platform. The site also highlights its outreach efforts and provides an introduction to immersive XR technology and insights into the development behind these innovative applications.