Researcher Chat: Alison Bates on Using VR in Ocean Research

Have you ever experienced a floating wind farm up close? This research team made that possible through virtual reality to find out what people in the Gulf of Maine think about this type of offshore renewable technology.

Additional Resources:

• “Trust, fairness, and transparency: Perceptions of energy justice in Maine's offshore wind planning process” (2025)

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Transcript

Researcher Chat: Alison Bates on Using VR in Ocean Research

Abbey Greene: The ocean. For many, it's a source of life and peace, but it's also a source of complex issues. Welcome to For Shore, a podcast for talking about those complex ocean issues.

Scientists routinely ask people questions to understand what they would think about hypothetical situations. But what if they weren't only able to ask questions? What if they were able to drop you into a virtual reality?

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Alison Bates: It's one thing to read some text on paper, but it's completely different to have not just a visualization, but an immersion where you are actually interacting with a wind farm. What they expected to see is not what they saw.

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Abbey Greene: In this episode, we talk to Alison Bates, a researcher who uses virtual reality technology to visualize changes in our oceans.

Poonam Narotam: This podcast comes to you from Sea Grant, a national program that brings top-notch marine science to all coastal U.S. states and territories. This season we talk with researchers funded by Sea Grant in 2021 about how coastal communities are grappling with new oceanic industries. Fishermen, in particular, are experiencing a lot of changes, and Sea Grant is committed to supporting them. We'll delve into social science, people's perceptions of ocean uses, and how ocean spaces can be shared. We're going to have candid conversations and together we'll make research more accessible and understandable for us all.

Abbey Greene: I'm Abbey Greene of Rhode Island Sea Grant.

Poonam Narotam: And I'm Poonam Narotam of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant.This episode highlights the voices of coastal communities in Maine, which fishermen have called home for a long time. The researchers wanted to understand how people think and feel about offshore renewable energy development. They spoke with people living in fishing communities all along the Gulf of Maine, especially fishermen and fisheries managers, and they found that while people have different opinions on offshore renewables, they have some things in common too. Without further ado, let's hear from Alison Bates.

Alison Bates: In the study that we're talking about today — Community Engagement And Stakeholder Perceptions Of Floating Offshore Wind — we're looking at fishing communities up here in the Gulf of Maine. We really have two major activities in this research. We're looking first at attitudes and values around floating wind and how those may be similar to and different from fixed foundation technology. Due to the really nascent level of knowledge and experience with floating wind, we're doing this research using an innovative immersive virtual reality experience so that participants are able to have firsthand experience with a floating wind farm and to be able to answer some of the questions that keep coming up in public outreach and engagement meetings.

Abbey Greene: Alison is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Colby College in Maine. Her study focused on understanding how people feel about floating wind in the Gulf of Maine.

Alison Bates: We're looking at different ways that commercial fishers and fisheries managers perceive stressors related to floating wind.

Poonam Narotam: In talking to people living in fishing communities along the Gulf of Maine, the researchers found that there are a lot of different factors causing people to feel stress as this new industry comes to their hometowns. It's hard to pin it all on one thing and to come to firm conclusions. Alison's team used virtual reality technology — VR — as a research tool. They handed participants a VR headset preloaded with a carefully constructed simulation that exposed them to a floating wind farm and then asked for their thoughts.

Alison Bates: We elected to use virtual reality in part because, especially with floating wind, we are hearing a lot from people that they're being asked to respond to some sort of public comment period, or they're being asked to give feedback on coexistence. It's one thing to read some text on paper, but it's completely different to have not just a visualization, but an immersion where you are actually interacting with a wind farm. This is a relatively new method that's being used in public engagement work.

Poonam Narotam: Can you take us through what people are seeing through the virtual reality technology that you're using?

Alison Bates: We decided to build a floating wind array based on the technical specifications of a reference 15-megawatt turbine, and then we built out a 10-turbine array at the correct distance. We worked with a number of engineers to make sure that we got the distances correct, the movement correct — how they would list and move under different sea conditions — and the sound, expected noise, and how that would interact with the ocean environment.

We put in a few different reference points: a data collection buoy and a fishing boat, both moored near the wind farm, so that users could have a spatial reference point. Many of the participants in our study had not used virtual reality before, so there was a bit of a wow factor. We were really careful in the creation of the virtual environment, which went through probably a year of pilot testing, to make sure we got it right and to make sure we hadn't made it too cool — we didn't want it to be so amazing that it would be distracting from what we wanted people to focus on, which was the wind farm.

When people would first put on the headset, they weren't allowed to look at the environment yet. They had a blank screen, and then they were prompted to tell us in their own words what they expected to see. We said: we're putting you on a cliff on the Maine coast, looking out at the ocean at a wind farm — tell us what you can see. We were able to gather a description of people's expectations of what was going to be there, what the visualization was going to look like. Then we put people into the environment where they could see the array from a cliffside view. We modeled an island on the Maine coast and placed it initially at five miles away from a 10-turbine floating wind farm.

Abbey Greene: You might be thinking this sounds like a small wind farm. The wind farm Alison's talking about is meant for research purposes. It's supposed to have up to 12 floating wind turbines, which is much smaller than the wind farms built off the shores of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Alison Bates: We ask people what they can see and whether they can describe that to us. Then we iteratively take people closer — they see the wind farm from a cliff, from the beach, then we put them in a boat. They travel closer and closer to the array and give us these descriptions of what they're seeing, how they're reacting, and what they expect to see. We also change the array configuration a little so that people can see, for example, a transit lane. We put people in that transit lane and asked fishermen about the likelihood that they would be able to use it or maintain active fishing in that area based on the distances — and based on actually being in that environment. That's a brief overview of what people could see in the virtual environment.

Abbey Greene: What did people say and how did they react as they experienced a wind farm?

Alison Bates: Almost everybody had this sort of initial reaction: what they expected to see was not what they saw. And it tended to sway in the way of confirming their existing beliefs about the wind farm. We heard really different things. Either: "it's not as much of a monstrosity as I thought it would be," or "it's so much worse than I thought it was going to be." It didn't matter where they stood on the support, opposition, or neutral line — everybody had preconceived ideas about the aesthetics. That is largely based on the media, the conversations, and the outreach that federal and state agencies have done. They were expecting to see something that didn't look very good, even if they were strong supporters of offshore wind. Overall, almost everybody expected the wind farm to look much larger and much closer to the coast. We felt pretty confident that we had accurately captured what people would actually see, so I would say it's notable that there is largely inaccurate information informing the basis of people's opinions right now about this.

Poonam Narotam: One thing Alison's team wanted to understand was what people already knew about offshore wind and how that colored their points of view. We asked Alison what she heard from people she talked to throughout the project.

Alison Bates: One of the first questions that we ask people in our interviews is: what have you heard, do you agree, and what do you think? I can't speak for everybody, but I'll make some broad generalizations about what I'm hearing on the ground. First: most — not all, but most — people generally recognize and acknowledge the climate mitigation benefits of offshore wind. That's true of people who both like and don't like offshore wind for various reasons. It's not a universally held opinion, but most people recognize climate change strategy and that offshore wind is one of the cogs in that wheel.

I've been finding that people who are supporters of offshore wind tend to want to justify their support. They'll talk about a number of things that are negative about offshore wind or floating wind specifically, and then say, "but I still think the trade-offs are worthwhile." There tends to be a really strong recognition that there are trade-offs, and whether those trade-offs are worth it seems to be one of the pivot points between supporters and opponents. A lot of opponents don't think that those trade-offs are necessarily worthwhile. We often have to really prod people to talk more about some of the benefits, because the climate benefits are taken as a given at this point for many people — not all. By far, environmental concerns — and specifically wildlife concerns — are the thing people first go to when talking about whether offshore wind is a good thing or a bad thing.

Abbey Greene: We asked Alison to share the key takeaways of this research. She starts off by advising people to be critical consumers of information, but she says it's hard to tell what information to trust when there's so much out there.

Alison Bates: There are a lot of different perspectives, and challenging yourself to look beyond what might be in your daily feed — in whatever form that is — is important. I do agree that there's a lot of information circulating and people largely don't know where to go to get trusted information. We certainly experienced a great deal of distrust of many different institutions in our study.

Poonam Narotam: Some of that distrust has been built over decades and generations, and it's a hard tide to turn. Alison said many people feel academic institutions are not as trustworthy as they used to be, or that even if people do think of academia as a good source of information, they might not know to look there. Alison also said that people spoke a lot about how their identity is tied to the place they call home and that those values can really shape their points of view.

Alison Bates: There's a real challenge in overcoming distrust that has been quite deeply rooted in communities over many years, decades, or generations. One of the things I wanted to talk about is identity and values — and this idea of heritage. When we are talking with members of fishing communities, that doesn't just mean people who are on the water. It might mean people who are working shoreside, or who have family working either on the water or shoreside, or whose businesses are supported by fishing community members. They spoke so strongly and passionately about how important maintaining access and maintaining fishing is to their own personal identity — being out on the water in places where past generations had been, and how critical that is not just to their sense of self, but also to passing along this type of knowledge, this type of feeling and value, to future generations. So there are very strong connections with sense of self and sense of place, and then with future generations and access to opportunity for future generations.

People talk a lot about livelihoods. If we're talking about a decision maker or maybe industry or a developer, we hear the framing to be around lost revenue. But that's not really the way that members of the fishing community talk about fishing's value. They're talking much more about place-based identity — the identity of a state, or a region, or a town, or a village, or a small neighborhood. That is what feels under threat: how your heritage and your fishing identity might go away or lose opportunity for future generations. That's where we're seeing a lot of pushback.

We talk about economic compensation packages or community benefits agreements, and so much of that conversation is around dollars. But this identity of a place is very much wrapped up in who we are as a community and who we have been, and wanting to preserve that identity. It's not just a fear of change, but a value placed on that identity — it's really, really important to people. This isn't just for people who have a direct stake; it's for people who might appear to be watching from the sidelines, but not really, because it's their neighbors. They are willing to jump in and wrap their stake up with that of someone who isn't technically in their group. And that is this preserving of heritage and identity — of who we are and how wind energy could potentially threaten that. That was incredibly prominent in pretty much all of the research that we did in the context of this study — we heard that more than really anything else. I do think that this concept of who we are and our place-based value is critically important, and it's very hard to address in a regulatory or decision-making space.

Abbey Greene: Alison isn't the only researcher funded by Sea Grant to make some of these connections. If you want to learn more about how people's identities, values, and connection to place really shape their perceptions, check out the episodes of For Shore featuring Jessica Reilly-Moman and David Bidwell.

Poonam Narotam: Alison, what advice do you have for community groups who are trying to raise their voices in these conversations?

Alison Bates: What we're hearing is that there's a perception — and I think this relates to some of the media influence — that fishing community members don't feel like they really have a say. That is at odds with maybe sometimes decision makers who feel like there are a lot of opportunities for input.

First of all, public engagement is sometimes not very accessible for a variety of reasons — it's not just about time of day. It might not be comfortable; it might not always feel like a safe space. We need to start building authentic relationships with community members who are going to be affected. It really needs to be authentic and two-way and not just one way. A lot of our engagements are viewed as performative or extractive by community members, because there's not necessarily a perception that anything is being given back — there's just ask after ask, but no give and take.

My second point around engagement is that decision makers, industry, or researchers should think about how to cede power back to the community members themselves. This is hard to do, especially if engagements are prescribed by regulation or by law. But really, best practice around community engagement is to give decision-making authority back to stakeholder or community groups themselves. This means moving past informing communities and offering public feedback and input sessions, and really thinking about how to cede power. That is hard and uncomfortable to do, but I think that building trust and giving power back is a principle that we morally should strive towards. It's not just the right thing to do, but it's also a way that we can together co-design solutions that work for our society. We're hoping that some of our work can shed a little bit of light on some of those engagements and how trust and relationship building is so strongly a part of the story of attitudes, values, and perceptions of this new industry.

Abbey Greene: Thank you, Alison, for sharing these insights from your study. Alison and her team published a peer-reviewed paper on their work in the summer of 2025 and are working on several more right now.

Want to learn more? You can find research publications, more resources, and other episodes of For Shore on our website, seagrantenergyorg. We're all learning together, so send us your questions.

Poonam Narotam: This episode was produced by Ryan Campos of the University of Rhode Island Inner Space Center. And this podcast would not be possible without the support of our funders: Rhode Island Sea Grant, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant, the National Sea Grant Energy Liaison Initiative, the Northeast Sea Grant Consortium, NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Prince Charitable Trusts, University of Rhode Island, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

See you next time, For Shore!