SYDNEY, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- A collaboration between Australia's National Parks and Wildlife Service and a number of other partners showcased a groundbreaking virtual reality project in Sydney on Friday, which enables people with disabilities to explore the country's most awe-inspiring landscapes.
The idea for the initiative came when local social enterprise, New Horizons, began to work with National Parks and Wildlife Services to find innovative new ways to make national parks more accessible for people with disabilities or mobility issues.
The project have developed four virtual reality experiences in Uluru, the Great Barrier Reef, Kangaroo Island and the Murray River.
The team at New Horizons also enlisted the help of potential users to understand what they wanted out of the technology.
Catherine Smith, was one of the first to test the demonstration app and gave the experience a "big thumbs up."
"The reaction has been great!" Watson said.
"There is a thrill in and of itself watching people react to the technology, but more importantly to the experience and the emotion and that I guess is what it's really all about, using technology to enable people's lives and to help them life more enriched lives."
"Projects like this are about enabling technology and human centered innovation because progress isn't progress if you leave people behind," tech disruptor Anne-Marie Elias, from the Design Innovation Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney told Xinhua.
"It quickly became apparent to us that this was an opportunity that would allow us to open up national parks in a way that may never have been possible before," said Head of Communication at New Horizons, Ryan Watson, after 18 months of research and discovery.
"That led us to technology and it led us specifically to virtual reality," Watson said.
