Gaming and engineering combined to create VR Tairāwhiti flooding experience

Auckland University engineering lecturer Dr Michael O’Sullivan presents his research at the Tairāwhiti Resilience Research Symposium last month.

Ever felt the world of engineering was out of your reach?

Researcher Dr Michael O’Sullivan aims to make it more accessible through his virtual reality game of building stopbanks to offset the flooding of Tairāwhiti rivers.

Mixing the worlds of gaming and engineering, Associate Professor O’Sullivan is building a live 3D model of Tairāwhiti to see how Gisborne’s floods could play out with different infrastructure, and he wants residents to try it out.

Conducting his research from Te Pūnaha Matatini, a research facility hosted by the University of Auckland, Dr O’Sullivan is part of Resilient and Sustainable Tairāwhiti (RASTR) — a group of Gisborne locals and Auckland researchers exploring community-led planning across Tairāwhiti.

Dr O’Sullivan said he wanted to “engage, inform, excite, decide” through virtual worlds, data storytelling, games and augmented reality.

“My research is about building models for problem-solving, where the people can come along with you”, he said.

“I’ve found that by involving and engaging with community members, you get all kinds of really interesting outcomes.

“If you put technology, science and expertise in their hands, then what they come up with is way more interesting than what I would as an outsider.”

The idea of “play” is an important element of his 3D map.

Participants can build dams and see how they fare against Gisborne’s extreme weather events.

“It might enable participants to get back a feeling of control — something that was lost during the cyclone,” he said.

After lecturing in engineering at The University of Auckland for over 20 years, Dr O’Sullivan said he noticed a lack of diversity and he wanted to make science accessible to all.

“I want the community that we’re working on an issue with to be engaged, not just with contributing information into the model, but also in using the model to help solve the problems.

“This is the thinking behind the digital ecosystem philosophy.”

Digital ecosystems can work in a variety of different fields and can help in exploring things like equity and accessibility.

“This ecosystem is a great way to involve Māori and Pasifika in the communities,” he said.

Engineering NZ says research shows engineers make up 3 percent of New Zealand’s workforce, and of that percentage, only 18 percent are women.  Māori and Pasifika are also under-represented.

In regard to his live 3D map, Dr O’Sullivan said a lot of the water sensors were washed away during the floods, so he is sourcing his data from the communities.

He is collecting personal anecdotes and footage from the floods to build an accurate representation of how and where the water moved.

Dr O’Sullivan said the research needed to be carefully considered as personal anecdotes could retraumatise people.

AI could also be a scary topic, but it offered an opportunity to build accessibility and equality into communities.

“AI and gaming . . . can bring quite abstract concepts into relatable ways for people to digest science.

“I’m not sure if it’s just because I’m getting old and mellow, but I’ve found that work with communities has been a lot more meaningful to me.”