Tree Health in Virtual Reality

This Defra funded feasibility study to Investigate and evaluate the use of Virtual Reality (VR) for plant health education and awareness began last autumn to explore the potential of VR and the type of resources needed to create a fully immersive experience and ability to enhance existing training and engagement. Resources developed aim to enhance learning and development for APHA’s plant health inspectors. However, the project will also investigate its suitability for use across a wider range of stakeholders to gage its full potential.

VR has enormous potential to reach out to new audiences, raise awareness about plant health and demonstrate good biosecurity practices thus contributing to Defra’s GB Plant Biosecurity Strategy Outcome 2 ‘a society that values healthy plants’.

The project timeline can be seen below, along with the press release detailing the project, videos, talking heads and images from the project so far.