Tuesday, 9/16/2025 from 2:45 PM - 3:45 PM EST (Education Block 2)

Room: W108

Topic(s):
Accessibility, Marketing and Public Relations, Recreation Programming, Technology, 2025 Conference Theme: Build Together, Play Together

Description:
This session will provide participants with strategies for using virtual reality (VR) to increase engagement and access in park and recreation settings. The facilitator will introduce four ways that park and recreation organizations can incorporate virtual reality: to attract new audiences to their park with 360-degree video tours; make hard-to-reach park elements more accessible; encourage workforce development through virtual reality career exploration and skill-building; and encourage future recreation pursuits among users by providing VR tourism and activity exploration. The session will provide examples of how these experiences can be created by park and recreation staff, using a model of 360-degree video production created for a university recreation and leisure course. Participants will be able to try virtual reality recreation experiences created by undergraduate students in the course using VR headsets. After the facilitator guides participants through these virtual recreation experiences, they will show the process of how they were created using affordable hardware and software. This will include details on how recreation professionals can record 360-degree video experiences and share them on the web and social media.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to describe the four benefits of using virtual reality to increase accessibility and availability of park resources for target populations.

2. Attendees will be able to select hardware and software that can be used for creating 360-degree immersive video and engaging in virtual reality (VR) experiences with VR headsets.

3. Participants will be able to create (or describe the steps to create) a virtual reality immersive tour of a park or recreation activity.

Speaker(s):
Nathan Williams