Environmental Study of Urban Forestry Using Data Visualization with Extended Reality

Visualization is a powerful tool for interpreting data and information, expanding one's perspective on a subject, and leading to accelerated scientific discovery. In environmental science; specifically environmental justice, certain issues can be difficult to understand from the outsiders point of view. Visualization has a particular appeal in aiding in the translation of complex information by using maps and other geolocation-aligned data sets. The project is focused on displaying environmental health data of deforestation in urban areas using extended reality (XR) with provided software and hardware; Meta Quest 2, Unity, and ArcGIS; along with programming languages, C#, and Python. It provides a guided framework for data visualization in extended reality while recognizing the factors that are relevant to urban deforestation which includes housing redevelopment, health effects, and population decrease. The study is still in development however, the plan is to create a virtual interactive interface that shows predictive models of urban deforestation to come. This study is an example of an educational approach to XR development.