CamelVR: A Virtual Reality Serious Game for Understanding Camel Plastic Ingestion in Desert Ecosystems

Plastic pollution in desert ecosystems is perceptually remote from daily life, making causal understanding difficult. This study presents CamelVR, a virtual reality serious game organised from a camel's first-person perspective, integrating perceptual constraints, delayed consequences, and traceable feedback. A between-subjects experiment with 72 participants compared Immersive Interaction (IM), Basic Interaction (BM), and Video Documentary (VD), assessing immediate post-experience knowledge performance, presence, empathy, and pro-environmental behavioural intention, supplemented by semi-structured interviews. Both interactive VR conditions showed significantly higher scores than passive viewing across all four outcomes (all p < 0.001; ε² = 0.590–0.683). No significant differences were found between IM and BM. Positive within-condition empathy–intention correlations were observed across all three conditions (ρ = 0.682–0.850). These findings suggest that interactive VR conditions were associated with stronger immediate cognitive and affective outcomes than passive viewing, while the combined IM-specific features did not yield measurable incremental benefits over BM.