We developed an 5-minute WEB experience about Perseverance rover for Nautil.us magazine. The idea is to have a shared virtual world where you can look at a couple of installations and listen to the narration (recorded by Elizabeth Tasker).
The other visitors are displayed as ammonites. This theme for the avatars was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, the magazine's name is "Nautilus". Secondly, the landing site of the rover is Jazero crater that once was a lake.
The experience runs within the browsers and works on all kind of devices including stand-alone VR headsets.
This experience is the great test platform for the public shared virtual worlds for science communication. Our very preliminary results are available here with more coming soon.
In short, we see an evidence that the presence of the avatars increases the active time people spend within the experience.