Targeting Environmental Challenges Using Interactive Visual Technology

Dear Colleagues,

Environmental concerns have now become global challenges faced by the entire world. Human-centered technologies, tools, and services are, therefore, urgently needed to assist people in dealing with these challenges. Interactive visual technologies can play an important role in helping users to become better aware of environmental issues and challenges, and understand their causes, as well as their socio-economic impacts. As a consequence, users can then take environmentally-conscious and appropriate actions, such as conserving energy, consuming natural resources more efficiently, dealing with sustainability-related concerns, and so on. Interactive visual technologies can also, in particular, address human behavior and support changes in negative behavior, which can then result in better achieving environmental user goals. Furthermore, such technologies can be used to create a bridge between environmental sciences and other disciplines, including many life sciences, economics, and sociology.

This Special Issue focuses on the role of interactive visual technologies in targeting current and future environmental challenges. The emphasis is on the interactive and visual aspects of such technologies, which might be software applications, tools, visualizations, educational games, gamification, and other digital services in the private, public, or industrial sectors. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of interactive visual technologies for:

-Monitoring and visualization of different kinds of environmental and user data;

-Monitoring and detection of human behavior and activity patterns impacting environmental factors, both on the small-scale, individual level and on the large-scale, population level;

-Facilitating exploration, interpretation, comparison, explanation, and simulation modeling using different kinds of environmental and user data;

-Creating awareness, influencing choices, and encouraging environmentally conscious human behavior changes;

-Utilizing different kinds of environmental data to support related applications in other areas, such as education, policy-making, public health, and well-being.

Prof. Dr. Masood Masoodian
Prof. Dr. Thomas Rist
Guest Editors

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