DO VIRTUAL REALITY ROCK HAMMERS DREAM OF ELECTRIC ROCKS? EXAMPLES IN DEVELOPING VR FIELD EXPERIENCES FROM SOUTH-CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA

Costs, location, ease of access, and safety make field experiences difficult for many educators and institutions. For students in highly urban cities like Harrisburg, PA it takes longer to get to a field site, and traffic in metro areas consumes much of that travel time. The lack of access to field sites also disproportionately affects low-income students, where the added cost of travel and/or class time may take away from needed employment or childcare duties. In recent years there has been a confluence of factors that make creating a truly immersive VR field experience less complex and more accessible than in the past. Here we discuss work developing a suite of VR field experiences for Earth science students in south-central Pennsylvania. Since VR field experiences are such a new concept, there exist no explicit best practices for setting them up; one of the goals of this work is to outline these use-cases for further application in later, more developed settings.