Outsourced: Experience the Environmental Impact of AI 

A Serious Game in VR

By now, it is widely known that AI has been adopted into our lives remarkably fast. The excitement over AI’s capabilities, however, often overshadows the reality that it requires enormous amounts of electricity and water and creates heaps of electronic waste. This extensive resource demand is invisible to users, making it difficult to fully grasp its environmental costs.

Outsourced, a serious game in VR created by TU Delft students for and in collaboration with the Immersive Xperience Lab, aims to make this cost visible. Serious games use engaging game mechanics to achieve goals that go further than entertainment, such as education, training, and behavior change. By simulating realistic situations in an immersive but risk-free way, they allow people to practice complex skills or experiment with decisions without real-world consequences and offer the possibility to experience the consequences of their actions. In combination with immersive technology, leveraging its strengths like personal impact and engagement, serious games become a powerful tool for improving learning outcomes, raising awareness through relatability, and stimulating behavior change.

In Outsourced, players must keep up with the growing demand for resources in a data center environment and experience its impact on a personal level in everyday life. Their in-game decisions to use AI to speed up daily shores impact the environment around them. This game takes a real-world problem, people’s usage of AI without considering the environmental cost, and teaches them about the consequences of their actions in an interactive gamified way with the aim of changing their behavior. The use of VR aims to make the experience more personal and relatable.