Funded by the USC Wicked Problems Practicum, USC students from Annenberg, Dornsife, Games, Viternbi and the Wrigley Institute harnessed emerging technology to produce immersive projects in the 2019-2020 academic year that illustrate how the climate crisis is threatening caribous and their habitats.

In partnership with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and supervised by Professors Robert Hernandez (JOVRNALISM) and Vangelis Lympouridis (USC Games), the team of engineering, journalism and game design students collaborated to create Beyond the Diorama, an interactive XR experience about the caribou diorama.

As climate change melts the permafrost and fuels a positive feedback loop of carbon emissions, it forces caribou out of their habitat and puts them in danger of aggressive species, from predators on their migration route to a new home to parasitic flies that could kill a baby calf alive.