VR Elephant Trip

How can immersive and interactive technologies arise the tourists awareness for avoiding riding an elephant or attending an elephant show on their trip?

“ The capture of wild elephants for domestic use has become a threat to wild populations where numbers have been seriously reduced. Because of the long years of infancy, when an elephant is not capable of work, it has been the custom to take wild elephants and train them rather than breed from domesticated animals ( IUCN World Conservation Congress, n.d.).”

Phajaan, or elephant crushing, is a long-standing accepted tradition in Thai culture. This harmful training method is what elephants undergo to become part of the tourism industry(world Nomads, n.d.).”

“Millions of tourists want riding elephants or washing them, or patting their trunks, but this is helping to fuel a rise in elephants captured from the wild and kept for entertainment. Moreover, WAP researchers assessed almost 3,000 elephants and found that more than three quarters were living in ‘severely cruel’ conditions (Claire, 2017).”

Insights

Nowadays, animal conservation issue is becoming more and more important. Animals and ecosystems have complex and important interrelationships. While helping animals to survive better, it can also help human obtain a better ecological environment. In Thailand, as long as tourists are willing to pay to ride and interact with elephants, more wild elephants will be domesticated in a cruel way. This problem is urgent since the domestic use of elephants has threaten the wild population and destroy the ecological balance.

Double Diamond Model

After summarising the various insights in the interview into seven social factors, and marked everyone’s attitude towards the factor, which can help to create Persona.

Final Concept Overview

VR

ELEPHANT TRIP

Starting Page

Click start to find out what is VR elephant camp.

Instruction Page

The interface of the operation instruction can remind users of the entire experience process, they need to get the VR glasses and sit on the elephant robot, and finally need to return the VR glasses after the experience.

Instruction Page

User needs to pay a certain fee( The fees charged will be much lower than normal VR experience projects). All the money we get will be donated to the elephant camp. After the user has successfully paid the fee, the glasses window under the machine will open.