Step onto the second floor of Allen Hall, open an augmented reality app on your phone and point it at the stunning oversized photos mounted on the wall. Suddenly, they come to life. Viewers are transported to a scene of scuba divers swimming through gently swaying seaweed above a colorful coral reef.

This underwater scene was captured in October 2024 by two graduate students and three faculty members from the UO School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC) who traveled to the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) in Kaneohe, Hawaiʻi for a science communication project. Their goal was to document resilience in the underwater ecosystem with a focus on sharing the story of the institute’s coral research. Their multimedia project is part of the SOJC’s ongoing Science & Memory project, an experiential learning opportunity dedicated to telling complex stories of adaptation to climate and environmental change.

The SOJC team traveled to Moku o Lo’e island, where they were hosted by the Coral Resilience Lab. They also had the chance to speak with researchers in the Shark Research Lab, Johansen Fish Resilience Program, Rappé Laboratory for Aquatic Microbial Ecology and Marine Mammal Research Program.

The mission of the SOJC’s student and faculty team was to tell the story of the crucial research being conducted on the island through a mix of traditional journalism, immersive media storytelling — such as augmented reality — and creative expression like watercolor painting. All the images and footage they captured were also shared with researchers, so they could use the assets for their own work.

Researchers at the Coral Resilience Lab study coral bleaching, a stress reaction that causes coral to turn white and eventually die when exposed to factors like warming waters or pollution. The goal of the research is to discover ways to foster an ecosystem where coral can thrive. The SOJC’s science communication team spent a week on the island, documenting the research and capturing the stories of scientists and volunteers working to protect the future of coral ecosystems.

“The scientists are doing important work, and they need a translator to get it out to people,” said Sam Z. Morrison, a recent graduate of the SOJC’s Immersive Media Communication Master’s program. “We used immersive media on this project because it’s the closest you can get to seeing it yourself, and we want to put their research out there in a way that makes people excited and care.”

Hollie Smith, assistant professor of science and environmental communication at the SOJC, said this project was an opportunity to build relationships and document important scientific work.

“Science communication can be a great invitation into the scientific process,” Smith said.

Sprada Mira and Sam Morrison’s biggest takeaway from the project concerned the power of community — the community they found in the research labs, in the ocean and with each other.

The SOJC team asked everyone they met, “What does resilience mean to you? And what have you learned about resilience through what you do?”

What they discovered was that to build resilience, you need community.

“Community is a central, fundamental, crucial aspect of resilience and of being resilient,” Sprada Mira said. “We learned a cool term — laulima — which means ‘the many hands.’ That really stuck with us because that’s what it takes, many hands, to build resilience.”

The project pushed the team’s scientific communication skills. One of Sam Morrison’s biggest challenges was finding new ways to use immersive technology to engage a general audience while still adhering to scientific standards.

Sprada Mira also spoke about the reality of being a communicator outside of Allen Hall.

“Everything I’ve learned about environmental communication and being a researcher helped me do a better job of actually being a communicator,” she said. “I had to learn how to do underwater photography. I had never done anything like that before.”

The team also had to adapt quickly when their technology didn’t function the same way in Hawaiʻi as it had on campus. Equipment they had tested in the controlled conditions of the University of Oregon’s Rec Center pool or in Allen Hall didn’t always perform as expected in the ocean or on the island.

Despite their challenges, the science they observed left the team feeling optimistic.

“You get very few positive notes in the climate world,” Sam Morrison remarked. “But this was proof that the work they’re doing is having a tangible effect. It matters.”