Underwater virtual reality for marine education and ocean literacy: technological and psychological potentials

Given the crucial role the ocean plays in human and planetary health, ocean literacy (OL)—understanding the ocean’s influence on us and our influence on the ocean—has been gaining momentum as a significant component and determinant of sustainable human-ocean interactions. Underwater virtual reality (UVR) enables participants to take a virtual dive while being simultaneously immersed in water. Through this unique double immersion, UVR is offering new avenues of psychological access and pedagogical opportunities toward the ocean; this study is thus the first to explore UVR’s potential for OL and marine environmental education. Following two UVR activities in a pool, we conducted semi-structured interviews and survey questionnaires with 19 marine scientists and education experts. Our findings indicate UVR has important technological and psychological potentials, including (1) high levels of presence, (2) infrequency of motion sickness, and (3) the ability to trigger powerful emotions and affective states such as awe, empathy, and flow. In this way, UVR can create a realistic experience of the ocean that improves OL and reduces psychological distance to marine environmental issues. We also advance a new seven-dimensional OL framework, following our findings that UVR has unique potentials for improving ‘emoceans’, attitude, awareness, and ocean connectedness.


Introduction
Covering nearly three-quarters of Earth's surface, the ocean sustains all life on the planet and plays a crucial role in human survival and well-being-including supporting 31 million jobs per year and providing significant daily sustenance globally (Costello et al. 2020;OECD 2016).However, human activities since the industrial revolution have been putting tremendous and increasing pressure on the ocean, e.g. by overfishing, climate change, and pollution (Heinze et al. 2021;Carney Almroth et al. 2022).The collapse of marine ecosystems is having significant impacts on the human population's physical, mental and economic health (Cooley et al. 2022), and disproportionately so among communities of color, developing countries, and other vulnerable populations (IPCC. 2022).Sustainable behaviors and the environmentally just use of marine resources are urgently needed to ensure human and planetary health.

Ocean literacy
To be responsibly involved in marine environmental issues as citizens, we need to be 'ocean literate'-namely, understanding our influence on the ocean and the ocean's influence on us (Cava et al. 2005).The concept of ocean literacy (OL) emerged in the United States in the early 2000s to address the lack of ocean science taught in formal education (Schoedinger, Tran, and Whitley 2010); it has since become an international movement (Fauville 2019).More recently, the United Nations Decade for Ocean Science for Sustainable Development has advanced OL as essential for ensuring the public develops 'a more responsible and informed behavior towards the ocean and its resources' (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission 2018, p. 12).
The OL theoretical framework has evolved over time.Originally, OL comprised three dimensions; knowledge, communication and behavior (Cava et al. 2005).In 2019, Brennan and colleagues built on the existing framework and added three more dimensions; attitude, awareness and activism.Most recently, in 2023, McKinley and colleagues expanded further on Brennan et al.'s six-dimensional framework by adding four dimensions; 'emoceans' (i.e.emotional connections), access and experience, adaptive capacity, and trust and transparency.This expansion resulted in a framework encompassing 10 dimensions.Table 1 presents how the OL dimensions have been evolving in OL from 2005 to 2023 and provides citations from the original papers defining these different dimensions.
Prior research, mostly focused on knowledge, has shown low levels of OL among the public (Jefferson et al. 2014;Eddy 2014;Guest, Lotze, and Wallace 2015) and high levels of misconceptions about the ocean (Ballantyne 2004).Several factors may play a role in the public's limited levels of OL, including the paucity of ocean-related content taught in school (McPherson, Wright, and Tyedmers 2020;Stasinakis 2021;Pazoto, Silva, and Duarte 2022).Few people have the ocean in their backyard, thus first-hand experiences of the ocean become challenging (Fauville et al. 2018).Even for those living by the ocean, the marine environment remains mostly hidden under the surface and away from the coast.Indeed, there is psychological distance (Trope and Liberman 2010): 'the ocean is commonly viewed as something far removed from human society […] it is deemed "out of sight, out of mind"' (Longo and Clark 2016, p. 465).Akin to environmental education promoting environmental literacy, marine environmental education thus serves as a key avenue for promoting OL.

Technology for environmental education
While often seen as a potential cause of human-nature disconnect (Pergams and Zaradic 2006), digital technologies also have the potential to enhance our relationship with nature by promoting our engagement with the natural environment (Ardoin, Clark, and Kelsey 2013).Kahn and colleagues discussed 'technological nature' as 'technologies that in various ways mediate, augment, or simulate the natural world ' (2009, p. 37).Watching nature documentaries positively impacts knowledge gain (Fortner 1985;Fortner and Lyon 1985), donation behavior (Arendt and Matthes 2016), and environmental sensitivity (Barbas, Paraskevopoulos, and Stamou 2009).Similar conservation benefits have been shown during both physical and remote webcam encounters with beehives that offer a valuable alternative when the physical, first-hand experience is impossible (Schönfelder and Bogner 2018).Technological nature may especially be valuable when the natural environment is difficult or inaccessible for human exploration, such as the marine environment.Recent studies using augmented reality to simulate interactions with marine organisms show an enhancement of environmental concern and nature connectedness (Pimentel 2022).

Virtual reality
Immersive Virtual Reality (VR), experienced through head-mounted display, mimics the physical world by tracking the user's movements and displaying corresponding visual and other sensory inputs, igniting the user's sense of presence.Immersion is defined as 'the extent to which the computer displays are capable of delivering an inclusive, extensive, surrounding and vivid illusion of reality to the senses of a human participant' (Slater and Wilbur 1997, p. 3).Presence, the '(psychological) sense of being in the virtual environment' (Slater and Wilbur 1997, p. 4), can be enhanced by increased immersion (Sanchez-Vives and Slater 2005).VR offers immersive virtual experiences that are psychologically impactful and perceived as real, enabling a wide range of experiences that would otherwise be dangerous (e.g.close-up visit in a volcano), impossible (e.g.becoming another species), counter-productive (e.g.creating an oil spill), or expensive (e.g.diving at a remote coral reef ) (Bailenson 2018).VR may also improve prosocial attitudes and behaviors by offering experiences from different points of view; e.g.virtually becoming a person from a different group leads to decreased race- (Hasler, Spanlang, and Slater 2017) or age-bias (Oh et al. 2016) and triggers empathy and connection (Herrera et al. 2018).
Through its immersive and realistic content, VR functions as an affective medium to elicit emotional responses both positive and negative.Indeed, a study found participants' level of presence inside VR influenced their corresponding level of emotions (Riva et al. 2007) and, in comparison to less immersive media, VR triggered more negative emotions than computers (Lavoie et al. 2021), pictures and videos (Susindar et al. 2019), and more positive emotions than computers and mobile phones (Flavián, Ibáñez-Sánchez, and Orús 2021), underscoring its unique potential in the relationship between presence and emotions.

Pro-environmental virtual reality.
VR's potential to impact users behaviorally and psychologically has also been the focus of recent environmental education research (Fauville et al. 2021a;Markowitz and Bailenson 2021).VR has potential to promote pro-environmental behaviors such as decreasing paper usage (Ahn, Bailenson, and Park 2014), water usage (Bailey et al. 2015), and meat consumption (Fonseca and Kraus 2016).A review of 16 experimental studies investigating VR's impact as an intervention tool to influence consumer behavior concluded that greater immersion enhances VR's effects on pro-environmental behavior (Taufik, Kunz, and Onwezen 2021).VR can also enhance knowledge concerning environmental issues (Queiroz et al. 2022;Makransky and Mayer 2022;Stenberdt and Makransky 2023), alongside involvement with environmental issues (Ahn et al. 2016), pro-environmental intentions (Plechatá et al. 2022), and ocean empathy (Blythe et al. 2021).The immersive nature of VR is also emphasized as a key contributor to environmental education (Breves and Schramm 2021).However, Calogiuri et al. (2023) remind us that immersive virtual nature scenarios still do not provide the range of sensations that are experienced in the natural environment.

Underwater virtual reality and the ocean
Presence is impacted by the amount and realism of the sensory input perceived (Zeltzer 1992) and is an essential component of VR-based environmental education, so one may question the sensory disconnect experienced when the VR content intends to mimic the marine environment while the user is physically grounded.Standing on the ground (i.e.experiencing gravity) while wearing a VR headset showing an underwater swim triggers conflicting sensory clues-a simultaneous standing and floating position-that can negatively impact presence.Since VR has already shown promising outcomes for environmental education, especially through visual immersion, we now turn to its potential for marine environmental education through double immersion; namely, the combination of visual immersion in VR and physically experiencing the sensation of being immersed in water.Various types of waterproof VR headsets have been developed (Nagata, Hatsushika, and Hashimoto 2017;Osone, Yoshida, and Ochiai 2017;Hatsushika, Nagata, and Hashimoto 2018), while others used strategies with only partial bodily contact with water (Han, Wang, and Chou 2023).
Few studies to date investigated double immersion's potential using an underwater VR (UVR) headset.One focused on VR's ability to distract and alleviate a patient's severe burn pains in a hydrotank (Hoffman et al. 2004).The researchers observed that the patient's sensory and pain ratings were reduced and hypothesized that the VR-based analgesia decreased time spent dwelling on the pain thus diverting and reducing the attention available for processing pain signals (Ibid.).Hatsushika and colleagues trained scuba divers in the safety of a pool and found that a 'strong sense of reality' was achieved through the combination of weightlessness in the water and highly immersive visual content (2018, p. 1).Vection, which is the illusion (i.e.conscious and subjective experience) of self-motion that integrates cues from many sensory modalities, including vision, audition and skin, appears to play a key role.Fauville et al. (2021b) explored double immersion's effect on vection, presence, and visually induced motion sickness in ground-based versus water-based experiences of the same underwater diving VR footage.Results showed greater vection for participants immersed in water; however, motion sickness and presence did not differ between conditions.While this study shows greater vection in UVR than in VR, researchers have not yet explored the potential impact of vection itself on environmental education.Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, the intersection of vection (triggered by any device) and education has not been explored.Finally, since the promising new field of research on double immersion in VR is currently unexplored, we do not know if and how double immersion may play a significant role in OL and marine environmental education.

Research questions
With the aim of developing knowledge of UVR's potential role and impact in marine environmental education and OL, we address the following research questions: • RQ1: How do participants experience a virtual marine dive in UVR and what are the main elements that shape the experience?• RQ2: How do experts evaluate the potential of virtual marine dives in UVR for enhancing each of the six OL dimensions?• RQ3: What potentials and limitations of UVR for marine education (and education in general) do experts foresee based on their own experience?

Procedures
Employing an exploratory qualitative study design by engaging a sample of marine scientists and researchers in the field of education, this study received ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority board (#2022-01210-01).The recruitment process involved sending emails to researchers in departments specializing in marine science or education at the large European university where the study took place.Nineteen participants were accepted on a rolling basis from August 28, 2022, until September 10, 2022.The participation condition was the ability to swim; otherwise, no previous experience with VR or diving was requested.Following information sharing and consent, participants booked a time for their UVR experience in the swimming pool (September 5-9, 2022) and for their interview via Zoom (September [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]2022). 1 Participants individually partook in the UVR experience in 30-minute intervals at an indoor local swimming pool.Upon arrival, each participant signed the consent form and received detailed instructions on the specific order of procedures. 2 Once in the pool with all equipment adjusted, participants watched the same two UVR videos with the diving mask transformed into a VR headset while floating on top of the water. Prticipants were able to look around during the activity but were instructed to keep their ears underwater as the headset's sound travels to the ears through water.For safety, participants were supervised at all times and tethered to the researcher for the whole duration of the experience using a flotation belt (Figure 1).
After watching the two videos, participants were debriefed and reminded of the interview taking place a few days later.
The following week, at a scheduled time, participants individually partook in semi-structured interviews.Prior to beginning, participants provided verbal consent to video recording for verbatim transcription purposes and were reminded of their right to decline answering and withdraw consent at any time.The interview recordings-totaling 14 h and 22 min (M = 45 min and 24 s, SD = 7 min 12 s)-were later transcribed.

Materials
The two UVR activities were displayed on a Samsung Galaxy S8 SM-G950F mobile phone running a custom operating system designed by Ballast Technologies, Inc.The mobile phone was secured in a waterproof case inside the UVR headset, designed to let water between the lenses and display to decrease the headset's buoyancy and maximize visual clarity (Figure 2).The researcher started and stopped the UVR activity video by placing near-field communication cards against the external yellow part of the UVR headset-connected with the back of the phone-when the participant was already in the water in the appropriate position.
Each participant experienced the same two 5-min long, 360-degree computer graphic imagery videos 3 -referred to as the first and second UVR activity-in the same respective order, besides one for whom the order was reversed by mistake.In UVR activity 1, the user is taken on a drift dive in the ocean and visits shipwrecks and caves while passing near different charismatic megafauna such as manta rays, sharks, and humpback whales while listening to relaxing instrumental music (Figure 3A).In UVR activity 2, alongside instrumental music, an instructional voice (the diving partner) guides the user through a diving mission to rescue a young humpback whale stuck to a rope on the mat of a shipwreck (Figure 3B).These UVR activities, created for entertainment purposes, did not constitute a scientifically accurate representation of an ecosystem, but were rather modeled to be experientially 'ideal' by visually blending several ecosystems (e.g.coral reef, kelp forest).

Data collection
To address our three research questions, we collected data first through open-ended questions about participants' UVR experience from both their personal and professional perspectives. 4For the second part of the interview, we shared a link to an online Sunet survey, which the participants then completed while sharing their screen with the researchers to explain the rationale for their ratings and help frame the discussion.Using a 5-point Likert scale (1 = No potential to 5 = Very high potential), participants rated UVR's educational potential for each of the 6 proposed OL dimensions (Section 1.1) and were asked to verbally elaborate upon their choice. 5 Since McKinley and colleagues' 10-dimensional framework had not been published when we designed this study, the starting point for the OL dimensions we set out to explore came from Brennan et al.'s six-dimensional framework (2019)-attitude, awareness, knowledge, communication, behavior, activism.We modified their framework by removing the dimension of activism since it is commonly considered a type of environmental behavior (Stern 2000;Lubell 2002).Instead, in the field of environmental literacy, 'nature connectedness' is seen as an important element for 'healthy and responsible human relationships with nature' (Shume 2016, p. 5332), which depends on the extent to which humans feel connected to nature (Hadjichambis and Paraskeva-Hadjichambi 2020).Nature connectedness refers to the extent to which individuals include nature within their identity (Schultz 2002), making it an important dimension of environmental literacy.The concept of 'ocean connectedness'-the extent to which a person considers the ocean as part of their identity (Nuojua, Pahl, and Thompson 2022)-appears necessary for OL.Therefore, we removed the dimension of 'activism' and added the dimension of 'ocean connectedness' to Brennan et al.'s version (2019), leading to a new, OL conceptual framework with the following six dimensions (Table 2). 6

Participants
Of the 19 participants (Table 3), ten were researchers in marine science and 9 in education (M age = 42,3, SD age = 11.2).In this way, participants were able to give professionally informed opinions about both UVR activities' scientific and pedagogical accuracy and were able to form educated opinions about UVR's potential roles and applications.Participants had never experienced UVR prior to this study.Thirteen participants had previous experience with scuba diving, three with snorkeling, while three had never used a snorkel before.Out of the 19 participants, one was an expert in VR, 6 had used VR a few times, 7 had used VR only once, and 5 had no experience.

Data analysis
Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun andClarke 2006, 2019) was employed for the data analysis.In accordance with reflective thematic analysis, the researchers immersed themselves in the interviews and identified and selected themes of interest to answer this paper's specific research questions.This method is well suited for under-researched areas such as UVR, as the analysis and results maintained the richness of the dataset.The analysis and themes were derived directly from participants' explicit statements, employing a semantic approach (Linell 2009).In order to Table 2. conceptual framework of ol with the description of each of the six dimensions.dimension description attitude degree to which a person has a set of values and concerns about the ocean and the motivation to actively contribute to the improvement of ocean health.awareness degree to which a person is aware of and sensitive to marine environmental issues.Behavior degree to which a person engages in actions to minimize their negative impact on the ocean, and to maximize their positive contribution to ocean health.communication degree to which a person engages in informed discussions about the ocean.Knowledge degree to which a person understands the ocean, and marine environmental issues.ocean connectedness degree to which a person considers the ocean as part of their identity.enhance interpretative depth and reflexivity, two researchers conducted the analysis (Braun and Clarke 2022) following the four phases; familiarization with the dataset, two full iterations of semantic sentence-level coding between two researchers, theme generation and clusterings based on numerous individual and group analysis sessions, and finally, literature-based interpretation and representative excerpt selection. 7The excerpts are presented in the Results and Discussion section with an identification number for each participant (I1-I19).To improve readability, we removed verbatim repetition, stutter, and grammatical errors from the excerpts, while omitted data are noted as '[…]' .Participant excerpts are formatted in italics and quotation marks to easily differentiate them from the narrative surrounding them.

Results
Themes and subthemes are presented according to the RQs (Table 4); most participant excerpts can be found in Section 3 of the supplementary material.

Double immersion
Double immersion (Section 1.2.2.)-the combination of visual and physical immersion in waterwas a key element and plays an important role in various multisensorial aspects of the experience.Participants described how 'the sense of the water makes things more immersive' (I10), emphasizing the water's sensory input. 8They described UVR as 'a lot more immersive than regular VR' (I10) and 'the impression is the same as if you would be doing it for real' (I19).

Vection.
Participants experienced vection induced by visual input as: 'like you were swimming towards something' (I17).The visual input of seeing themselves moving with the current, combined with being in water, resulted in 'feeling like you're dragged with the current' (I8) and how, 'logically you know you're at the surface, and you still get the feeling you're actually sinking' (I2).They also noted the vection difference between VR and UVR. 9

Motion sickness.
Only two participants mentioned motion sickness associated with the use of VR; one mentioned expecting and experiencing it given prior discomfort while diving: 'I did get slightly seasick […] I've been so sick scuba diving, why would it be different in UVR?' (I11).The other 'had nothing at all' (I8) in UVR despite the tendency to experience motion sickness in VR.

Presence.
Participants described factors enhancing and breaking the feeling of spatial presence, and an altered perception of time.
Participants self-described presence 10 was like 'not being in the pool with a chain around the waist, but actually experiencing the ocean' (I4).Some recurrently expressed surprise at the high level of presence they experienced despite coming into the study with a critical mindset.In comparing VR versus UVR, one mentioned UVR provides the 'feeling you're actually more part of the experience than with regular VR' (I10).The UVR equipment closely resembles regular snorkeling and scuba diving equipment, further enhancing presence: 'you're having these goggles and the snorkel, you're breathing the same way' (I10), including the sound traveling through water from the headset to the submerged ears of participants. 11 Several aspects of the experience, including physical and auditory, broke presence: 12 'that float around the waist meant that you couldn't swim properly or down.It felt like something was physically holding me back' (I13).Sometimes participants' ears went above water and heard the ambient sounds of the pool. 13Others noted how the inability to see their hands and arms onscreen reminded them of the experience's virtual nature: 'I couldn't see my arms, that was a bit unsettling' (I16).
Experiencing a lack of control was also emphasized.While the UVR headset displays a 360° CGI video that dynamically changes according to head movement, participants were unable to control it: 14 'Sometimes I wanted to look around more or see more of the environment and I didn't have the time to do that because I had to follow the experience' (I10).The footage's lack of realism also broke presence, especially for experienced divers or marine scientists who could spot factual inconsistencies.One criticized the incorrect diving hand signals participants were instructed to perform as part of the second activity, while others criticized the biological inaccuracy of the video's content. 15 Heightened presence contributed to altered time perceptions-both longer and shorterdespite being priorly informed about the exact duration of each UVR activity: 'They felt longer than they were because you lose your frame of reference with the world around you' (I11).'Describing time distortion, they described the activities as lasting 'between one second and forever' (I18). 16

Affective and emotional reactions
Participants expressed a variety of emotions, including complex affective experiences such as awe and wonder, belonging, empathy, and flow.

Curiosity.
Expressing curiosity, some described themselves as 'an explorer' (I15).Others contextualized their curiosity as: 'It was like an adventure that you were doing and it was a bit emotional even' (I7) and 'the experience of curiosity […] of sort of exploring that on your own' (I3).

Tepid emotions.
While most participants noted positive experiences, others expressed tepid emotions; e.g. one 'didn't find the content particularly interesting' (I16), while another described how their high expectations tempered their experience. 20  3.1.3.5.Fear.Fearful and mixed reactions were described as; 'Wonderful but also a bit scary' .(I9); 'When we started going really deep, you get this emotion of like, whoa, it's a little bit scary, but I also like it' (I17).High activation negative experiences of fear ranged from the feeling 'that makes your stomach twist a little bit' (I13) to 'occasionally quite terrifying' (I9), from instant startle reflexes to more complex fear reactions when experiencing perceptual vastness. 21  3.1.3.6.Awe and wonder.Participants described elements of complex emotions such as 'awe' (I4), 'wonder' (I17), feeling 'mesmerized' (I12), and 'very amazed' (I15).They detailed these as: 'Feeling small, maybe… that was my experience with that, and I think it was also a bit of wonder' (I1).'I felt a certain level of wonder at a number of different points throughout.[…] The feeling of being exposed to something aweinspiring.So, the same feeling that I get if I'm standing on top of a tall mountain and looking at the view or if I'm watching some awe-inspiring natural scenes […] -that level of 'oh wow, this is the world around me!' (I11).

Belonging and empathy.
The experience of coming into close contact with marine animals elicited complex emotions, including a sense of belonging, empathy, and connectedness: 'I felt that I'm one of the organisms in the ocean' (I18); 'They were animated, of course, […]but it gave another feeling of now being one of them, swimming around' (I9).They related their feelings of belonging to triggering their empathy, as they 'could relate to the small whale that was caught in the rope' (I18) and felt 'protective and didn't want anything to interfere with this environment' (I18).Those less familiar with the ocean prior to their UVR experience expressed a novel sense of visceral empathy. 22

UVR for ocean literacy (RQ2)
We investigated UVR's potential for enhancing the six dimensions of OL (RQ2).Participants ranked OL's awareness dimension as the one that might benefit the most from UVR, while the knowledge dimension was rated the lowest (Table 5).We explicitly note that the goal of this analysis was descriptive and not inferential, given the study's exploratory nature and thus small sample size.

Awareness
Participants expressed that increasing awareness about marine environmental issues, beyond just knowing facts, requires experience and immersion in the issue.They strongly emphasized UVR's potential for enhancing awareness due to the saliency of its emotional effects: 23 'You can really raise awareness in a sense that you can never do without being part of an underwater experience' (I18).

Attitude
They rated attitude as the second-highest dimension by emphasizing that first-hand contact with the marine environment is critical for attitude enhancement: 24 'Probably people don't care so much about the ocean because they don't have access to it, but if you have first-hand contact with bad things that happen to the ocean, you would probably be more caring' (I12).

Connectedness
Ocean connectedness was also seen as a prominent dimension, with participants emphasizing the experience's direct and visceral nature: 'you feel like you're part of something that is usually invisible for you' (I18); 'You can watch a video, you can read a book about the ocean, but if you are immersed in this VR activity, you can really feel it in your body.So, then you feel more connected' (I12).However, some argued UVR's potential may differ based on the user's prior connection with the ocean, with great potential for little-experienced users and little potential for experienced users. 25Some mentioned UVR not being a replacement for real ocean interaction: 'It still isn't the real ocean, so for now I would say that it has maybe slight potential' (I10).

Behavior
Ratings of UVR's potential for enhancing pro-environmental behavior were varied; e.g.participants argued that users directly experiencing the negative consequences of human behavior on the marine environment through UVR may experience self-reflection and positive behavior change: 26 'if you get to see a disaster, if oil has been spilled in the sea or plastic garbage and things like that […] you can get more conscious about your own behavior and say OK next time I won't throw this because it can end up in a fish's neck or something' (I12).Others did not see how a user trained through UVR would change their behavior, and as such expressed less UVR potential for behavior change. 27

Communication
UVR's potential rating for enhancing communication about the ocean was also varied; participants emphasized the range of emotions that UVR triggers as a powerful element for post-UVR discussions about the ocean: 'Because people that experience the UVR will then interact on a much more emotional and personal level with the information and with the experiences they have' (I11); 'Communication usually can come from experience of what you have experienced and then you can articulate it more' (I6).The current technology prevents communication during the experience itself, which some saw as a barrier. 28

Knowledge
UVR's potential to improve knowledge was rated the lowest.Some said the potential is high because of the direct and firsthand experience UVR provides. 29Others emphasized they would rather use UVR to trigger emotion and connection rather than target factual knowledge: 30 'The VR thing is more of an emotional connection rather than getting better at remembering facts.When I told you what I remembered from the videos, it was emotions that I remembered.Not necessarily a specific fact or detail about what I saw in the video' (I13).

UVR for marine education (RQ3)
The potentials and limitations of UVR for marine education and the rationales behind its usage were discussed.

Potentials of UVR
Participants noted UVR's two most promising applications-making the ocean more accessible and triggering positive emotional responses to the ocean-and discussed the types of content that could maximize its potential benefits for marine education.

Making the ocean accessible.
They noted the ocean's invisibility and inaccessibility and how UVR may help bridge the gap in first-hand human experiences: 'We only relate to what's on the surface, so very few of us have been beneath the surface […] And when you're part of it, you also want to be more protective, because you are in this world.And you experience something that is unique' (I18).Others noted the marine environment's inaccessibility varies spatially across regions and populations and thus UVR may create more equitable access. 31For target audiences unable to access the ocean, UVR could become a powerful teaching tool, e.g. for 'universities that are inland teaching marine biology' (I14).

Triggering emotions.
UVR was emphasized as a powerful tool for triggering meaningful emotions and connecting with the ocean through these emotions: 32 'The main advantage of this thing is the emotional connection that you feel' .(I13); 'It's a way of getting strong emotions […].Love for the ocean, guilt for what we are doing, and sense of responsibility' (I19).Further, one mentioned UVR may reduce the psychological distance between the user and the ocean: 'I would go back again to my experience -you relate, it doesn't feel like something very far away' (I6).

Content types.
By emphasizing that UVR could showcase the biological richness of life in the ocean, participants argued it could promote learners' 'understanding of biodiversity' (I13) and present the 'different biomes of different parts of the ocean' (I1). 33  UVR may meaningfully and directly show users our negative impact on the marine environment by presenting contrasting scenes: 34  'People have a tendency to subconsciously think that when you throw something in the ocean, it's gone.[…] You could have videos of pristine areas versus videos that are actually recorded in areas that have a lot of underwater litter (I13)' .
Visualizing negative human impact through UVR may introduce an important temporal understanding, making it a potential tool for transporting users back in time to witness the negative environmental changes in a more compressed time manner: 35 'That experience could be powerful in VR, if you're feeling like you're actually there and you're looking at this beautiful reef and lots of color and fishes, and then it shifts into a dead landscape' (I19).
Some noted seeing value in UVR for showcasing large-scale phenomena such as: 'The global current […] to be able to show that model in a small-scale and be able to swim around and see the different parts of it could be really nice' (I1).Overall, participants emphasized keeping the UVR experience as realistic as possible; they reasoned that presenting molecules or elements that are normally invisible to the naked human eye would make the experience less real and may even create what one coined as 'virtual unreality' . 36

Limitations of UVR
The three limitations with UVR were the technology not being a 'magical solution' , its lack of accessibility, and the need for its content to be reasonably designed.

Not a silver bullet.
Participants characterized UVR as being one of many learning tools and not a way to solve all educational problems: 'It will be at its most effective when people don't look at it as a shiny new tool to try to use for everything and it gets to the point where people accept it for being very good at some things and limited in other ways' (I11).Others emphasized the focus must remain on the educational learning objective and not the technology itself. 37

Lack of accessibility.
While UVR enables (virtual) access to the otherwise remote marine environment, there are potential financial and physical accessibility issues, including the equipment's cost and the need for staff and facilities to use it.There remain limitations inherent to the technology itself: 38 'There are so many issues that make this quite impossible to do on a larger scale -in regular school there's no time for that, no resources' (I10).UVR requires submersion in water, and breathing through a snorkel, with potential physical and psychological accessibility challenges. 39

Need for content soundness.
As participants experienced UVR activities that were designed for entertainment purposes, they noted how the extent of its benefits critically depend on the content's pedagogical soundness and scaffolding: 'The content not only has to be interesting, but adapted to what you really want to teach' (I7).
They expressed that UVR should not be used in a vacuum, but rather through thoughtful framing of the learning activities.Participants envisioned using UVR as a starting point in the learning journey, 'Because the idea is to raise interest and get people in a place where they are receptive to new knowledge or information' (I17).Others could see UVR being the most meaningful at different times during the learning process: 40 'It can be a good icebreaker to start with because it's a wow factor.But you can also use it to go deeper into the knowledge' (I12).
Concerns were raised about the overwhelmingly negative psychological impact potential future UVR content may have, especially for environmental issues: 41 'If you go into a VR world where there's all these dead corals and there's whales suffocating that you can't rescue, I think you get a really -rather than getting ocean connectedness -a negative feeling instead of a positive one' (I17).They also brought up ethical issues due to the technology's potential to trigger strong emotions: 'If you're trying to trick the person into feeling that it's real, then you also have to be careful with how far you take that story' (I17); 'We don't know the impact that this will have on the participant, so ethics are a big part' (I6).
Reflecting on the UVR content's scientific accuracy, participants emphasized 42 'to make sure it's correct' (I17) and suggested having 'fact-based videos that are really accurate representations of reality in [UVR]' (I13).

Double immersion
Beyond traditional VR's localized audio-visual sensory modalities, UVR's double immersion attributes also stimulated (1) the skin's 'sense of touch' somatosensory system, (2) the vestibular system through the weightlessness feeling, and (3) the proprioceptive system through joints and muscles.When experiencing an underwater dive in UVR, all sensory modalities create a coherent scuba diving illusion.Participants' high levels of vection and presence and low levels of motion sickness parallels the negative relationship between motion sickness and vection (Keshavarz et al. 2014) and motion sickness and presence (Weech, Kenny, and Barnett-Cowan 2019).
Vection has been studied for more than 150 years with various conditions and visual input (Cheung, Howard, and Money 1990;Mach 1875).However, water immersion's impact on vection has received little attention.This study, as secondary evidence, confirms the role UVR's double immersion plays in enhancing vection (Fauville et al. 2021a(Fauville et al. , 2021b)).
Motion sickness while in VR, results from conflict between visual and sensory cues inside VR (Gallagher, Dowsett, and Ferrè 2019).Only one participant mentioned such symptoms.The low motion sickness occurrence may result from double immersion's visual-sensory cues alignment, resulting in weaker sensory conflict and greater vection.While Fauville et al. (2021aFauville et al. ( , 2021b) ) did not show a significant difference in motion sickness between VR and UVR, they attribute this lack of effect to the measurement tool's inadequacy for more immersive aquatic conditions.Our findings serve as a steppingstone to understanding UVR's potential for motion sickness prevention.As sickness triggers distraction that can negatively impact learning outcomes (Hsin et al. 2022), preventing it is essential for UVR's educational application.UVR could be a learning tool adapted to marine environmental education and remove some of educational VR's traditional barriers.
Participants' heightened presence indicates UVR enables meaningful access to the marine environment when the physical equivalent is inaccessible.We expect the virtual ocean to be as close as possible to the real ocean to foster realistic responses and behaviors from learners, triggered by (1) place illusion, the feeling of presence, and (2) plausibility illusion, the impression that the scenario in VR is occurring for real (Slater 2009).Makransky and Petersen (2021)'s Cognitive Affective Model of Immersive Learning (CAMIL) identifies presence and agency as the two responsible mechanisms; with presence being a key consideration in UVR for marine environmental education.The CAMIL only considers the knowledge dimension of learning-one OL dimension-that needs to be promoted.Research has shown presence's positive impact on attitude (in tourism; Tussyadiah et al. 2018) and connectedness (in social context; Onderdijk et al. 2021).Future research should investigate the role of presence in UVR on each OL dimension.The centrality of presence for marine environmental education makes factors breaking it important to address.Participants described how inconsistency in the virtual environment (lack of plausibility illusion) broke the place illusion or presence, as did the invisibility of their arms.This invisibility, along with the lack of agency to control the dive, constitute an important breach in the CAMIL that conceptualizes agency and presence as affordances of learning through VR (Makransky and Petersen 2021).Moreover, the CAMIL also considers a positive interaction between agency and self-efficacy.The concept of self-efficacy is especially interesting as in their meta-analyses, van Valkengoed, Steg, and Perlaviciute (2023) identify it as one of the factors more strongly associated with climate change adaptive behavior.In other words, it seems important to work toward increasing self-efficacy in UVR.Addressing the lack of agency should be at the forefront of the future development of this technology by, for example, integrating controllers.
Participants' time distortion can be interpreted as a sign of flow experience (Kim and Ko 2019), defined as the 'holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement' (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 36).Flow is characterized by presence, enjoyment, and time distortion (Skadberg and Kimmel 2004;Chen 2006)-three elements consistently experienced by participants-and is associated with being 'cognitively efficient, motivated, and happy' (Moneta and Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 277) and better learning outcomes in environmental education (e.g.Wang et al. 2023).All these aspects will likely play a key role in developing OL through UVR; the interest in flow has not yet emerged-we suggest UVR as an ideal starting point to remedy this.

Affective and emotional reactions
Participants' overwhelmingly positive affective reactions to their UVR experience indicate strong potential for marine environmental education.Positive affect, such as enjoyment, mobilizes individuals and broadens their array of behaviors (Fredrickson 2001).UVR's ability to induce both high-and low-activation positive affective states could be applied towards pro-environmental interventions.Participants' curiosity, related to flow, makes individuals more open to new information and experiences (Csikszentmihalyi 1990).This echoes participants' emphasis on UVR's potential to trigger the mobilizing emotional states that lead to improved OL.
Participants experienced several aspects of awe (Yaden et al. 2019), including curiosity, freezing responses (Joye and Dewitte 2016), and fear mixed with positive affect and perceptual vastness (Yaden et al. 2019).Participants' time distortion (Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker 2012), feeling of being small or insignificant (Piff et al. 2015), empathy and belonging indicate awe (Yaden et al. 2019).Empathy is associated with improved pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors (Berenguer 2007).This connection to other entities (e.g. the whale pod in UVR activity 2) also increases collective engagement (Bai et al. 2017).Participants' powerful emotional reactions indicate UVR's potential as a positive 'affective medium' (Susindar et al. 2019).Especially awe's effect, already seen as a distinct mechanism in traditional VR due to its shared feature with our brain in triggering embodied experiences (Riva et al. 2018), may be even more uniquely amplified by UVR's double immersion characteristic.

UVR for ocean literacy (RQ2)
Although the OL dimensions are interconnected, participants' dimension ratings revealed distinct potentials for UVR.Their top three ranking of awareness, attitude, and connectedness underscores these dimensions' potential to shift the ocean from an 'out of sight, out of mind' (Longo and Clark 2016, p. 465) status to an ocean that can be virtually experienced by inducing presence and realistic responses.Since interaction with the natural environment can increase pro-environmental attitudes (Wells and Lekies 2006), awareness (Sandell and Öhman 2010), and nature connectedness (Hinds and Sparks 2008), and VR can realistically mimic such interactions, (1.2.1.),we find UVR's potential most powerful for enhancing these three dimensions.While the OL dimensions of behavior, communication, and knowledge may also benefit from UVR, its current attributes might not specifically support these dimensions.Indeed, in UVR, one cannot yet (1) practice pro-environmental behaviors, (2) communicate verbally, and (3) engage in various knowledge acquisition activities.
While this study's theoretical framework included six OL dimensions, our results, along with McKinley, Burdon, and Shellock (2023) publication, encourage us to suggest an update.Our findings depict the extensive role emotions played in UVR; participants emphasized their importance both from both their personal and expert perspectives.During our data collection, McKinley, Burdon, and Shellock (2023) published their ten-dimensional OL framework and argued for emotional connections (coined 'emoceans') as 'how a person feels and emotionally responds when they think about, are near/within, or consider issues relating to the ocean, coasts and seas' (Ibid., p. 3).Our findings suggest adding McKiney and colleagues' (2023) 'emoceans' to the initial six-dimensional OL framework used in this study that we originally adapted from Brennan, Ashley, and Molloy (2019).We now suggest a seven-dimensional OL framework: 'emoceans' , attitude, awareness, ocean connectedness, behavior, communication, and knowledge (Figure 4).
Our new OL framework includes the dimensions of 'emoceans' (i.e.emotional connections) and 'ocean connectedness' , both of which require further discussion.The emoceans dimension focuses on the role that emotional responses (ranging on a spectrum from negative to positive valence) can play in pro-environmental behavior change, such as empathy, fear, or happiness (McKinley, Burdon, and Shellock 2023).Emotions are brief in duration (i.e.minutes) and high in intensity as their evolutionarily adaptive purpose is to quickly mobilize the organism (Ekman 1992).They typically involve synchronized changes in five organismic subsystems, including information-processing cognitive appraisal and/or physiological changes (e.g.increased heart rate, sweating) (Frijda and Scherer 2009).As such, the 'study of emotions can shed light on the human mind in general and contribute to our understanding of specific reactions to different wildlife species' (Jacobs, Vaske, and Roemer 2012, p.5).Based on this definition, emoceans relate to humans' affective reaction to the marine environment.
In contrast, the dimension of ocean connectedness relates to one's identity in relation to the ocean.Indeed, the concept of nature connectedness revolves around how individuals define their sense of self in relation to the natural environment and the connections they establish with nature (Restall and Conrad 2015).Historically, this concept emerged from an interest in the notion of self in nature (Schultz et al. 2004) and was originally conceptualized as 'the extent to which an individual includes nature within his/her cognitive representation of self' (Schultz 2002, p. 67).
Based on the literature described above, we argue that emoceans and ocean connectedness can be phenomenologically differentiated based on duration, intensity, and organismic subsystem activation, with the former being shorter-term, higher activation, state-adjacent emotional reactions versus the latter constituting longer-term, trait-adjacent identity formation toward the ocean that is related to the more enduring effects of the cognitive appraisal component of emoceans.While this distinction is consistent with Schultz's cognitive interpretation of nature connectedness described above (2002), it can also be challenged.For example, Restall and Conrad (2015) highlight the wide range of terms used in research for the construct of connectedness to nature such as nature relatedness (Nisbet, Zelenski, and Murphy 2009) or emotional affinity toward nature (Kals, Schumacher, and Montada 1999).Moreover, Mayer and Frantz (2004) define connectedness to nature as the level of feeling emotionally connected to the natural world.
Regardless of whether conceptually distinct or not, emoceans and ocean connectedness are critical components of OL as a vector to enhance 'a more responsible and informed behavior towards the ocean and its resources'' (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission 2018, p. 12).Indeed, knowledge does not seem to suffice to trigger pro-environmental behavior.Researchers trying to address this knowledge-action gap have come up with a wide range of factors influencing pro-environmental behavior (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002).Connectedness and emotions seem to impact a wide range of these factors leading to behavioral change.Connectedness to nature has been shown to predict pro-environmental attitudes, concerns, behavior intention and behavior (e.g.Schultz 2002;Mayer and Frantz 2004;Nuojua, Pahl, and Thompson 2022).Emotions have also been deemed essential to humans' decision making and behavior (Brosch et al. 2013).When it comes to environmental issues such as climate change, across the existing literature, emotions are 'consistently found among the strongest predictors of climate change risk perceptions, mitigation behavior, adaptation behavior, policy support, and technology acceptance' (Brosch 2021, p.18).Negative emotions are especially impactful to change behavior in relation to climate change adaptation (van Valkengoed and Steg 2019).
Since the field of OL is both new and essential for reaching the goal of the United Nations Decade for Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, understanding its various dimensions is crucial.Hence, we consider it important to keep these two potentially vital dimensions separated in order to promote their specific and deeper investigation.In other words, we encourage discussion around the validity of our suggested framework with 7 dimensions as it is crucial to expand the scientific discussion around OL and its theoretical framework.

Potentials of UVR
One of the potentials of UVR, according to participants, is to decrease the public's psychological distance to the ocean.Future UVR content targeting the four-dimensional psychological distance construct-spatial, temporal, social, and hypothetical distance from an issue (Trope and Liberman 2010)-could make the ocean more accessible and viscerally proximal.Providing information about environmental issues alone is insufficient to trigger behavior or attitude change (Bray and Cridge 2013;Clayton et al. 2015); personal connection, relevance (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002;Bamberg and Möser 2007), and direct experience are more powerful (Spence et al. 2011).Participants noted UVR can make users travel through time, space, and scales of phenomena, thereby potentially reducing psychological distance from our negative impact on the marine environment.However, this needs to be further investigated in the field of marine environmental issues, as recent research has challenged the idea that decreasing psychological distance can lead to more climate action, with more rigorous experimental research needed on each of the concept's four dimensions of spatial, temporal, hypothetical, and social distance (Brügger, Morton, and Dessai 2016;van Valkengoed, Steg, and Perlaviciute 2023).The experience-perception link concept (Lang and Ryder 2016) has shown a positive correlation between experiencing environmental issues and risk perception (van der Linden 2015), pro-environmental attitudes (Lang and Ryder 2016) and behaviors (Li, Johnson, and Zaval 2011).UVR shows great potential as a pro-environmental intervention tool.

Limitations of UVR
We emphasize Pimentel et al. (2022) word of caution concerning the long history of techno-utopia in education (Cuban 1986).UVR's challenges, e.g.lack of accessibility, need to be discussed critically, as a tool itself can never be better than the way in which it is used in the learning context.Participants emphasized the importance of this tool's scientific, psychological, and pedagogical soundness for ensuring positive outcomes in OL.Scientific soundness is key for the plausibility illusion (Slater 2009)-a key tenet for realistic responses in a virtual world.So is pedagogical soundness, as UVR does not take place in an educational vacuum, and VR's educational outcomes depend on its scaffolding (Makransky et al. 2021).As such, within the CAMIL (Makransky and Petersen 2021), we must further investigate UVR's interaction with different instructional and learning methods.Environmental educators have struggled with the tension between positive and negative affective stimuli for motivating pro-environmental engagement (Sawe and Chawla 2021).The psychological soundness of future UVR content will have to account for emotions triggered in an ethical manner.

Conclusion
As the first exploration of UVR for marine environmental education and OL, this study opens numerous opportunities for future research.Our findings show that UVR creates a realistic scuba diving-like experience that leads to high levels of presence, infrequent motion sickness, and viscerally-felt access to the ocean and its marine environment when the real thing is inaccessible.UVR can also trigger positive affect, especially awe, empathy, and flow, which can (1) provide the emotional basis for improving OL and (2) reduce psychological distance to marine environmental issues.UVR's current limitations, especially its accessibility and technological challenges, must be addressed for the purposes of scaling these preliminary but promising findings. 43We also advance a new seven-dimensional OL conceptual framework consisting of 'emoceans' , attitude, awareness, ocean connectedness, behavior, communication, and knowledge, and find UVR to be uniquely advantageous and most promising for the first four.However, more research is needed on UVR's effects on each OL dimension.
See Supplementary Material Section 2.2.(A) for additional information.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.representation of the uvr experience.the participant is equipped with the uvr headset (a), snorkel (B), and flotation belt (c).the latter is clipped into an elastic tether (d) held by the researcher to ensure participant safety.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. our proposed seven-dimensional ocean literacy conceptual framework.

Table 4 .
overview of the themes and sub-themes.

Table 5 .
mean and standard deviation for the rating of the six dimensions of ocean literacy.