Brianna Bambic, soon to graduate from the Coastal and Marine Management master’s program at the University Center of the Westfjords, was recently awarded the National Geographic Early Career Grant. Her initial master’s thesis involved the creation of a new immersive virtual experience that allowed participants to see the changing Belizean reef from the last 40 years. She dove around Lighthouse Reef, Belize to gather present day 360-degree footage with an underwater camera. She then compared that present-day video to past footage taken from Jacques Cousteau and Howard Hall films (1967 and 2004, respectively). The compilation of these contrasting videos into a Virtual Reality (VR) experience aimed to recognize whether exposure to this VR experience could change people’s perspectives of the marine world.

With the National Geographic Early Career Grant, her goal is to improve the VR experience and expand her original master’s research. She aims to help determine the value of VR as a communication tool for community engagement and education in marine issues. There is also a potential for VR to act as a monitoring tool to understand human uses of marine ecosystems and identify threats to biodiverse areas. She hopes this research will help create a more tangible way to view our underwater world and bring people closer to the marine environment. Her research may further gauge conservation awareness and interest of the general public, and determine the success of conservation and management interventions to improve coastal management in the future.