The immersive visualization theater: A new tool for ecosystem assessment and landscape planning

In this study focusing on human-environment interactions, we analyze the use of an immersive visualization theater (IVT) for exploring how humans use and value cultural ecosystem services provided by natural landscapes in Israel's Carmel Forest. Our goal in this inductive, exploratory study is to assess the impact of the IVT on the quality and content of stakeholder discussions held in the theater. We facilitated 10 focus group discussions in the IVT, where a series of high-resolution photographs were projected. Participants were asked (in writing and orally) to choose from among the scenes where they would prefer to spend time, and then asked to explain their answers. Next, they were asked to describe activities in selected scenes in which they were likely to participate. We suggest that the immersion theater, due to screen size, photo resolution, social interaction, and group isolation within the theater, elicited attention to detail and triggered memories and sensory responses to various landscapes. The qualitative data derived from focus group discussions add to our understanding of the diverse meanings and importance that different people attribute to the landscape, contribute to understanding the social processes and conditions through which participants attribute value to cultural ecosystem services, and allow us to generate testable hypotheses for continuing research.