Restoring Memory of Water: UF Launches Immersive Springs Experience

What if you could step inside a Florida spring and watch decades of change in under five minutes? An interdisciplinary team at the University of Florida has introduced an innovative multimedia project that does just that. The project, “Sciences, Humanities, Intelligence, Nurturing Emotions” or SHINE, seeks to reconnect communities with Florida’s springs by addressing “environmental generational amnesia”. This phenomenon, also known as “shifting baselines” describes how ongoing ecological decline becomes difficult to notice or emotionally grasp, making it harder for people to recognize the true scale of environmental degradation or feel urgency about it.

Leading the SHINE project is Dr. Gabriele Belletti, an Assistant Professor of Italian and French of the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Dr. Belletti’s work spans environmental humanities, poetics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence, and his portfolio includes long-form and immersive artistic projects. For SHINE, he collaborated with departments and institutes across the UF campus to unite environmental humanities, neuroscience, and water-focused education.

At the center of SHINE is the newly developed immersive time-lapse experience that visualizes environmental transformation across decades. The interactive tool combines an evolving digital spring landscape with a narrated ecopoem, soundscapes, and synchronized visual elements. By guiding users through the past, present, and potential future conditions of Florida’s springs, the experience allows viewers not only to observe change, but to emotionally register its rhythm and magnitude. The experience counters the fragmented impressions people often have about environmental degradation and instead offers a clear, cohesive sense of ecological trajectory.

The ecopoem—written and narrated by Delaney Johnson, a UF graduate with degrees in Psychology, Linguistics, and Italian Studies—serves as the narrative spine of the experience. Johnson carefully structured the ecopoem to include 50 strategically selected “critical words,” which will later support the project’s second phase analyzing people’s neural responses to key narrative moments. Johnson’s narration is paired with detailed visualizations created by Jennifer Purington, a graduate of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute with assistance from Daniel Maxwell, an AI consultant in the UF Research Computing Department. The team visited multiple Florida springs, and they gathered extensive photographic references with assistance from Cody Davis, a 3D artist in virtual production. They then created a new composite spring environment in Unreal Engine, crafting custom vegetation, water materials, and supplemental models to align seamlessly with the ecopoem’s imagery. Those interested in experiencing decades worth of ecological change in Florida’s springs can do so through watching the video at the bottom of the page.

With the immersive video complete, the SHINE team is now moving into the project’s analytical stage. In collaboration with Dr. Eleonora Rossi from the UF Department of Linguistics, Dr. Sadie Hundemer and Dr. Jamie Loizzo from the UF Department of Agricultural Education and Communications, and the Digital Humanities Lab, the research team will work with undergraduate and community participants in measuring place attachment, nature connectedness, and emotional engagement. The team will leverage the ecopoem’s 50 critical words and track how viewers respond emotionally and neurologically to the story. By measuring the participants’ neural responses to key narrative moments, they can better understand attention, affect, and what resonates during the immersive experience. The study will also examine the effect of the experience on “generational amnesia” to potentially increase people’s ability to recognize signs of spring degradation.

By utilizing an interdisciplinary framework in creating the time-based visual narrative, SHINE demonstrates how humanities-driven storytelling, immersive technology, and environmental sciences can work together to solve complex problems and help communities remember and connect with Florida’s freshwater.

To learn more about the SHINE project, please reach out to Dr. Belletti, g.belletti@ufl.edu.

March 24, 2026