Nature's Pollinators is an Augmented Reality flashcard experience designed to teach children and young people about different pollinating insects and their favourite flowers. In the experience, you meet a bumblebee, an elephant hawk moth, and a painted lady butterfly, who each look for and recognise their favourite flowers on the cards.
The project came about as part of a research programme at the Royal College of Art in partnership with Snap Inc, where we were given the opportunity to explore new directions for AR using Snap Inc’s software, Lens Studio.
One of the lovely things about AR is that the user still has the ability to see and engage with elements of the real world. The sensory experience isn’t completely replaced in the way that it might be in VR.
This meant that we wanted to start from a place where we were making the most of the affordances of AR, by creating an experience where the digital information has a connection to something in the real world, be it body tracking, site-specific work, or image tracking. Linked are some of my favourite AR projects that I think do this really well.
Our group was particularly interested in exploring educational use cases for AR, and we started by prototyping ideas for image marker-based AR material.
Flashcards felt really lovely, because they fit in the palm of your hand, and in AR it feels like you can bring something closer to you – almost as if your phone was a special kind of x-ray magnifying glass.
Other AR cards experiences that we had looked at were beautiful, but tended not to have much interaction beyond triggering a tracked 3D model to the card. We wanted to have a game-like mechanic where there was an element of matching or ‘finding’ the correct card, and could imagine this being a fun activity in a classroom or interactive installation setting in a museum.
It was also important to us to have sound as part of the experience so that it wasn’t purely visual, so we worked with composer, Lian Dyogi, from MA Electronic Music at Guildhall who made a looping soundtrack for us to use. A voiceover narrates the on-screen text that gives the user fun facts associated with each insect and flower pairing.
One of my favourite learnings from the research behind this project was that moths are one of the most underrated pollinating insects as they do most of their pollinating at night. Perhaps this project can give a little more credit to our moth friends alongside bees and butterflies!
During development, filmmaker Sung Hoon Song made a video that documented our research and work in progress on this project. The project continued to develop after this video was made, but it's a great insight into our progress along the way.
So far, the project has been exhibited at The Snap Inc x Royal College of Art Symposium in September 2024, and our Lens has had over 53k views on the Snapchat app.
Made by Aarti Bhalekar, Ayushi Saxena, Riya Mahajan, and Ruby Bell. Music by Lian Dyogi