Imagining the virtual outdoors

I was thinking about how this kind of 'weather lockdown' may become more common with increasing climate instability. ..

Imagining the virtual outdoors


This past weekend, freezing arctic air dipped down to cover New England & had me staying indoors two days in a row. I was thinking about how this kind of 'weather lockdown' may become more common with increasing climate instability. Days where extreme heat or extreme cold can make even a short walk outside uncomfortable.

I don't own a metaverse headset from the company formerly known as Facebook, and my favorite form of virtual travel is the kind I undertake with a good book. I'm also aware of the vast amounts of energy and data usage that the AI powering these virtual technologies will require (which I think is a major impediment to companies trying to scale this tech globally & still keep their environmental pledges). But, setting that aside for a moment, I was imagining a couple ways that a kind of virtual traveling by 'metaverse' could add real value.

If there was a way of replicating aspects of popular travel destinations, I could picture a tour guide giving tourists some back-story to objects in a historical city as if they were on vacation (instead of inside a video-game-like space). I could imagine this seeming believeable-ish in a more densely packed human landscape (like London or Hong Kong) rather than a natural setting with a scale like the Grand Canyon. As far as the beach vision I pictured in the image at the top of this post: perhaps in the coming years, there will be many summer days where this becomes a viable option for experiencing that beach vacation.

The other type of virtual travel experience I imagined would be for a different kind of audience: climate change skeptics who play down the threats it poses. I picture a room of politicians being asked to put on a headset and pick a time & place in the next hundred years to travel to. Then they would be transported to a suburban California street in 2041 where a wildfire has wiped out the houses that would have faced them; or maybe it's downtown Miami in 2060 and floodwaters are thigh-high. A kind of 'experiential education' travel tour...
 

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I'm sharing this Washington Post article since the general topic about ways that individual changes (like switching to electric vehicles, etc.) can scale up and may have a lot of upcoming impact is interesting. But I have to say that I find the title of it annoyingly click-bait-y: 'Can individuals solve climate change? New federal cash makes it more possible than ever.' Maybe I have to accept that they're going for a wide audience & the lack of nuance with the word 'solve' helps ensure that.

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Jamie Larson
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