These virtual reality games can teach you about the Lehigh Valley’s watershed history

All you need to kayak down the Lehigh River, mine for zinc, or learn how to pack a flood emergency kit is a link to Lehigh University’s virtual reality worlds.

Structured as games and virtual field trips, six immersive scenarios teach players about the Lehigh Valley’s environmental and industrial history.

Two of the games are already available for VR headsets, and the Lehigh team is working to advance the others from desktop to headset versions and make them available at local nature centers and museums.

Field test locations for the games included the Lehigh Gap Nature Center, the National Canal Museum, the Jacobsburg Environmental Education Center, the National Museum of Industrial History and the Steelstacks Visitor Center at ArtsQuest.

VR scenarios meld history and science to show how a place like the Lehigh Gap Nature Center transformed from a barren industrial site to a wooded wildlife refuge.

As the first nature center in the country built on a Superfund site, the Lehigh Gap Nature Center has a unique story that VR can illustrate for those who can’t visit or aren’t able to hike, executive director Chad Schwartz said.

In addition to taking visitors out on the mountain and showing before and after pictures of acid rain, the VR simulations offer another way to explore the center’s restoration work, Schwartz said.

“There is some hope if people work together and try and make a change,” Schwartz said in reference to the mountain’s transformation, adding that he hopes virtual experiences will make even more people want to visit in person.

Available VR games for those interested in the region’s environmental history include:

• The Lehigh Gap Story: A desktop game (headset version anticipated this summer) in which a bird named Brownie guides players through interactive photospheres to explore the region’s industrial history, revegetation efforts and geology.
• Watershed Explorers: A desktop version (and two shorter versions designed for headsets) allows players to kayak the Lehigh River while learning historical and environmental context that helps them identify what spots would best support tourism.
• Mystery of the Lehigh Gap: Through six desktop mini-games, including ones inspired by Candy Crush and Angry Birds, players act as coal and zinc miners between 1845 and 1912.

Preparing for flooding

An additional game, Flood Adventure, aims to offer practical advice inspired by flood preparedness work at the Nature Nurture Center.

Major flooding in downtown Easton in 2004, 2005 and 2006 inspired the center’s founding and its focus on public outreach.

The VR game gives players three minutes to pack and evacuate as a flood threatens their home and then offers feedback on whether or not players chose to pack the most essential items.

The waterway in the game is based on the Monocacy Creek, but the input it provides about what items are most essential in an evacuation will be helpful to anyone wanting to be better prepared, said Nature Nurture Center science director Kate Semmens.

The stress the game’s timer provides mirrors the feelings a real-life evacuation can evoke, Semmens said, adding that the game models how to use a to-go kit to avoid a panicked scramble.

“With climate change, the frequency and magnitude of flooding is projected to increase in our area,” Semmens said, “so getting that awareness is key.”

Those who want more information about their neighborhood’s climate-change related risks, including flooding, can check out First Street (free trials and memberships are available for full data access). Their projections for downtown Easton can be found here.

Developing VR tools

The VR games are part of a curriculum bank hosted at eli.lehigh.edu that offers lesson plans and resources for using geospatial data to explore topics like tectonics, climate change and land use.

Development for these VR games started in 2018, and the faculty team included Lehigh educator professors Alec Bodzin, Tom Hammond and Zilong Pan as well as environmental science professor Dave Anastasio.

Student developers include recipients of the Lehigh Valley Social Impact Fellowship through the university’s Office of Creative Inquiry and education students completing a certificate in game-based learning.

Robson M. Araujo-Junior helped found the game design lab as a Lehigh graduate student and is now a professor at Kutztown University.

Araujo-Junior is from Brazil and credits video games with helping him learn English. Video games have great potential to expand literacy, he said, noting that Lehigh designed its immersive scenarios with a reading level that is accessible for all learners and Spanish-language options.

Students in the design lab traveled to the nature areas they sought to document, taking 360-degree photos and immersing themselves in the feel of the place in order to create games that capture Lehigh Valley’s cultural heritage and highlight its role in the Industrial Revolution, he said.

The new media of VR can bring together those recent images with the bank of historical images that local museums house and give players agency to explore all that context in an engaging way, Araujo-Junior said.

“We hope that more people can have access to that rich background of the place they live, which is the Lehigh Valley,” Araujo-Junior said.

The VR games take 3-4 years to complete, Bodzin said. The team has about two years left on its most complicated project to date, titled “How Healthy is Your Watershed?”

Gameplay will include conducting a virtual macroinvertebrate survey to assess water health and find the best place to fish based on the presence of aquatic insects.

“It’s most important to get kids outside in nature doing hands-on, inquiry-based learning,” Bodzin said.

But when schools don’t have money for field trips, aren’t located near a body of water or have no safe way to access nearby water, VR can be the “next best thing,” Bodzin said.

Moving forward, the design lab is working to incorporate live data feeds so that its models will update to reflect changing conditions in the watershed.

Pulling in flow rate data for rivers and streams could allow simulations to model flooding and allow players to walk through how rising waters could affect the area, said recent Lehigh graduate Madix Marlatt.

Marlatt started work with the design lab as part of his computer science capstone project and will continue working there this summer. Designers are still trying to figure out the full potential of creating a watershed map with live data, Marlatt said, with the desired goal being a virtual “sandbox” that players can explore while learning practical lessons about the area.

“It would be fun,” Marlatt said, “but the main point is you’d be able to interact with this map and get a hands-on look at what a flood can do and what are the damages of it.”

Reporter Elizabeth DeOrnellas can be reached at [email protected].