Sea Change
My Role: AR development, videography
Materials Used: Unity 3D, Vuforia, Final Cut Pro X
Year: 2019
Project Type: Academic
Game Demo
About
Our augmented reality experience, aptly titled “Sea Change,” is an immersive and gamified application aimed at educating users on the detrimental effects fast-fashion has on Earth’s climate. We took a specific example, the Arctic ice caps, and applied a visual storytelling piece in order to emotionally convey the very real impacts of climate change and the devastation of natural habitats. Set in the epicentre of downtown Toronto—arguably the shopping capital of Canada—we created a world that represents the duality of mankind.
As the user sees polar bears in their natural elements via virtual arctic zones floating in Dundas Square, they are prompted to turn around to be faced with the reality of consumerism and its most impactful manifestation: an entire mall built for fast fashion consumption. The experience allows the user to make choices. They are able to bask in the breathtaking imagery of a vulnerable species in their home or make the choice to educate themselves on the effects of capitalism and the consequences that come with buying into fast fashion. Though the experience is meant to be compelling and moving, we strayed away from an accusatory tone and strived to remain objective. Our aim was to use digital media as an educational tool to allow users to make their own conclusions and choices, rather than being force-fed an ideology.
This mobile app was created in collaboration with two other classmates.
Motivation
●To provide an educational digital experience on climate change through visual storytelling and blended multi-media.
●To present the user with compelling facts on fast fashion’s relationship with the Earth’s rising temperatures, specifically in the context of natural habitat destruction in the Arctic.
●To allow the user a gamified experience to make choices parallel to those asked of us daily in the real world—and to reveal their consequences.
Primary User Persona
To execute our goals, we began by creating the user persona, Julie. Julie is a first-year Political Science student at Ryerson University who just moved to Toronto from Windsor, Ontario. Julie has been surrounded by conservative values her entire life but is now surrounded by downtown liberalism. As a result, Julie is now actively thinking about political topics such as climate change, as a means of trying to figure out which side of politics she can best relate to. Julie is in need of an app like Sea Change so that she could visualize the gravity of the climate change crisis in “real” life.
Name: Julie
Age: 18
Occupation: University student
Profile: Politically undecided about supporting climate change initiatives
Problem: Wants to understand the “Climate Change” issue being discussed in her new social network
Cognitive ability: High level
Technical level: Tech savvy, comfortable with mobile AR
Concept Storyboard
In order to produce Sea Change, there were a number of assets, elements, and lines of code we needed to gather, learn and execute. As a group, we first came to the unanimous decision to showcase the Sea Change app as an augmented reality experience. We believed that AR would work best for the purpose and motivation behind our app because the intention of each use is to make user empathize more with the Arctic’s polar bears after seeing them in their own city environment. My team and I started this process by storyboarding and establishing the narrative. Narrative: (1) the premise, (2) the pre-generated characters, and (3) the pre-scripted story created by the system designers in order to elicit target emotional and cognitive states in the user, and help guide target user behaviors.
Final Demo
Our final demo showcases all of our project’s technical elements linked together. The first scene is a welcome screen that introduces the application’s name to the user. The user can decide when they would like to start playing the game by clicking the “start” button, which activates Scene 2. Scene 2 is the official introduction to our polar bear story. For this scene, we had to learn how to integrate audio as well as how to control our polar bear’s animations. To do this, we created a customized string of animations which we then assigned to the polar bear. We made it so that once the polar bear completed his final action in the string, he would stay there. For Scene 3, we learned how to import a video into Unity and have it play and pause upon the click of a button. As well, we learned how to make a button control the activation of sound without the need to write code. In the final UI scene, we also learned how to link a URL to a UI button using a line of code. Lastly, we learned how to link all of our scenes together seamlessly with a click of a button by repeating a line of code.