Leibniz Research Alliance “Advanced Materials Safety” - Safe materials communication
| Workgroup | Multimodal Interaction |
| Duration | 01/2022-12/2025 |
| Funding | Leibniz Association, IWM budget resources |
Project description
Advanced materials are of crucial significance for important future technologies in various fields of application, such as energy storage or biomedicine. However, due to the complexity of the hazard potential of these materials, it is not possible to make a general statement about their safety. As part of the Leibniz Research Alliance "Advanced Materials Safety", a dissertation project is investigating how immersive video technologies should be designed as a science communication format to convey content on the safety of advanced materials.
Despite the great innovation potential of advanced materials, they are considered controversial in public perception due to concerns about the impact of materials on humans and the environment. This publicly perceived controversy represents a problem in science communication and could therefore have an impact on trust in science. Using videos about advanced materials research, this project aims to investigate how immersive video technologies should be designed to convey content on the safety of advanced materials. In the virtual reality literature, immersive technologies are technologies that use virtual environments to submerge the user's perception in computer-generated stimuli. Immersive videos lend themselves to the investigation of this type of science communication as they are considered an authentic form of representation in that they create realistic scenarios, and the viewers of the videos can feel present in the environments depicted through immersion. Therefore, it will be investigated whether the experience of realistic scientific activities in an authentic scientific environment changes the perception of the topic. The focus in the investigation of the video design is primarily on different degrees of immersion and camera perspectives.
The project is part of the Leibniz Research Alliance "Advanced Materials Safety", in which eleven other Leibniz Institutes from the fields of materials development, human toxicology, environmental toxicology, research data management, and science communication are involved alongside the IWM.
Cooperations
Deutsches Museum (Dr. Lorenz Kampschulte, Hannah Kiesewetter)
Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (Prof. Ilka Parchmann)
