Is a VR Field Trip Better than the Real Thing?

• Position: EDUCATION - Virtual reality

Virtual reality has nothing on nature. Just ask the University of California, Santa Barbara, students who trekked to a forest before dawn to listen to a chorus of early birds. They had hiked into the woods for that very purpose as part of a field study course, tasked with identifying as many species as possible by their vocalizations. After 20 minutes, most had picked up the territorial call of a red-shouldered hawk and two acorn woodpeckers chattering in the trees. A few careful listeners detected the twitter of a hummingbird.

Amid their discussion of birds, no one expected to meet up with a mammal cameo, but when biologist Douglas McCauley emerged from the bushes with a small rodent in hand, he delivered a brief impromptu lecture about its features and then let it go. (McCauley coteaches a vertebrate biology course with Hillary Young, associate professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology.)

Rapid advancements in VR and AR have opened up a new genre of "electronic field trips" that mimic hikes, dives, and treks through nature. According to McCauley, both VR and AR have potential upsides, such as the capacity to move back and forth in time.

"With virtual reality, we could have transported the students on our birding trip back to a Pleistocene dawn in those same woods when they were full of 20-foot-long ground sloths and hungry saber-tooth tigers, or we could have taken them forward in time to a...