Background

In urban environments, opportunities to connect with nature are limited, and biodiversity is often neglected as city infrastructures expand. Butterflies, among nature's most vibrant pollinators, face declining populations due to habitat loss, climate change, and urbanization. Their decline signifies not only a reduction in biodiversity but also a direct impact on ecosystems and human food systems, where pollinators play a critical role in sustaining plants essential for agriculture and ecological health.

Inspired by the need to bridge this gap in ecological literacy, this project seeks to create an informative urban butterfly garden and museum exhibit—a space where visitors can engage with butterflies through interactive and immersive Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality experiences. By exploring this environment in which butterflies are given a space to flourish, individuals are invited to understand butterflies– not merely as creatures of beauty– but as indicators of environmental health and key contributors to urban ecosystems. My project aims to encourage actions that support urban biodiversity, fostering community-led initiatives that aid in butterfly conservation and habitat creation within urban contexts.

Assignment

Designing an Environmental Knowledge Experience

Team

Tara Farzin

Date

Feb. 2024 - Apr. 2024

Tools

Hoverlay Spaces
Unity 3D
Meta Quest 2
Photoshop
Blendr

PROCESS

Project Overview

A

The Challenge

Urban environments often lack awareness and understanding of the critical role butterflies play in pollination and overall ecosystem health. Many citizens are more familiar with bees as primary pollinators, leading to a significant gap in ecological literacy regarding butterflies. This disconnect results in insufficient action toward enhancing butterfly habitats and populations in urban settings, ultimately threatening biodiversity and the health of urban ecosystems.

B

The Solution

To address this gap in understanding, I developed an interactive AR and VR exhibit, "Fluttering Friends," designed to enhance human interactions with butterflies and foster ecological literacy among urban residents. The AR exhibit allows visitors to engage with pollinator butterflies in augmented reality, facilitating identification and appreciation of different species. The VR museum exhibit seeks to immerse visitors in a butterfly friendly educational space, incorporating informational audio triggers in virtual reality, and providing context about butterfly life cycles and native nectar plants. Through these engaging and educational experiences, the project aims to emphasize butterflies' significance in the ecosystem, and inspire visitors to take meaningful action towards conserving urban biodiversity and butterfly populations.

C

My Role as Experience Designer

As experience designer, I developed the overarching concept to enhance human interactions with butterflies by researching their ecological roles and urban biodiversity. I assessed the potential impact of the AR and VR experiences on fostering awareness and appreciation for butterflies, to further engage urban communities in conservation behaviors. I designed the multi-faceted user experience by creating two digital extended reality spaces. I utilized Hoverlay Spaces to arrange educational visual and textual elements in the AR space, creating a home for butterfly facts and species identification guidelines. This space can be accessible from any users' phone at the scan of a QR code.  Using Unity 3D, I designed and realized an educational museum walk space, with coded location triggers initiating informative audio components. The space features an indoor and outdoor butterfly habitat, comprised of assets and 3D modeled components via Blendr.

Entities Involved

Humans

Local residents, school children,  gardeners, urban conservationists

Butterflies

Pollinator butterfly species

Augmented Reality

An AR Hoverlay Space easily accessible at the scan of a QR code

Virtual Reality

A VR urban butterfly garden and educational museum exhibit, accessible with a Meta Quest 2 headset

i

PROCESS

Ideation
Ideating, Visualizing, Storyboarding

During the ideation stages of the project, I created a collage render, a storyboard, and concept sketches of the digital entities at play to act as a design guideline, and to visually demonstrate what I wanted my spaces to look like. For the VR space, I knew I wanted the design to be minimal with ample amounts of natural light, taking inspiration from precedents such as The Glass Pavilion, by Steve Hermann. I chose to incorporate glass wall and ceiling elements, making sure to leave plenty of space for greenery to be placed throughout for an indoor/outdoor feel. This greenery was intended to represent native butterfly milkweed and other plants that promote butterfly biodiversity. With the scope and timeline of the assignment, I was unable to find available assets representing the specific natural elements I wanted, and I did not have the time to create them from scratch myself. 

The AR experience was intended to be a physical sample of one of the educational interactions within my VR exhibit if it were to be actualized for use. I was able to create the sample and show how it would work with a QR code within the hypothetical museum space. Due to the timeline of the assignment, I was able to design one AR informational wall didactic, residing in a butterfly-friendly museum. The VR exhibit featured three different location audio triggers, which were pre-recorded AI speech-to-text elements at three of the tables within the room. These audio recordings described butterfly life cycles, instructions on how to plant butterfly milkweed, and facts about butterflies as environmental indicators.

d

Design
Design

The design of the Augmented Reality space within Hoverlay spaces was something I took on with the expectation that it would be a much easier process than it actually was. While it is an incredibly accessible platform with relatively basic tools and controls, it was the overly simplified nature of these tools that made the space a bit more difficult to create. I had to start with choosing the pollinator butterflies I wanted featured, as well as the pollination facts to accompany each one. I then rasterized them to have no background color within photoshop, before I could place them into my Hoverlay space. 

Placing, resizing, and viewing the images in the field of view allotted by Hoverlay was the most challenging aspect of creating this design. Zooming in and re-angling your view is easy enough, however with a trackpad mouse it was more difficult to move my field of view, as this entailed clicking, holding and dragging two fingers across the pad. With limited functionality of viewability to adjust or rotate my objects, it was also difficult to know whether I had the proper positioning and alignment in relation to other objects I was placing, and the viewer. 

Scan QR code below to download Hoverlay and access the AR experience

Design

Designing my Virtual Reality museum walk through experience was a very complicated and highly rewarding process. My first steps were to find available assets on the Unity Asset Store that would match the theme and goal of my project. This would help speed up the design process, as I had just under a month to complete and execute it. I was able to find a forest asset pack, complete with several different types of trees, bushes, floral plants and fungi. I ended up purchasing the butterfly asset pack I used for my final project, as it was the only one with enough variety of species that I wanted to highlight for my project, and the butterflies' wings were animated to depict flapping and motion. The museum exhibit itself was something I designed and built collaboratively in Blendr with a friend who is proficient in the software. As it was my first time using Blendr, they taught me the basic functions required for creating simple designs, as well as how to import over personal 3D design files into a Unity project. 

The challenges I faced in creating my VR world were associated with the learning curve of the softwares I had chosen to utilize for the project. I knew going into the project that my decision to learn Unity and Blendr was ambitious, but I was determined to push myself to use the resources available to me at my university and to learn new skills. It would have been easy to do my final project the same way I had completed my previous projects but I felt that I would gain more academically and personally by leaving my comfort zone. 

Final Design and Reflection

One of the biggest lessons I took away from this project was the importance of user perspective. Designing immersive AR and VR experiences required me to constantly think about how users would interact with and interpret the space. From the placement of assets in Hoverlay to the layout and functionality of the VR museum, I had to make intentional design decisions that would guide and engage the audience. These challenges taught me how critical it is to balance creative vision with usability—especially when working with emerging technologies.

Another key takeaway was the power of storytelling in design. This project wasn’t just about creating a visually appealing AR and VR space; it was about connecting people to a message. I wanted users to walk away with a deeper appreciation for butterflies and their role in our ecosystems. Through elements like the audio triggers and animated butterfly assets, I tried to craft an experience that wasn’t just educational but also meaningful and memorable.

If I were to revisit this project with a longer time frame, I would focus on user testing and incorporating more feedback into the process. I would also invest more time into creating custom assets that align better with the specific ecological elements I wanted to highlight. Despite these limitations, I’m proud of how much I was able to accomplish in such a short time.

The "Fluttering Friends" project was a transformative experience that pushed me to step out of my comfort zone and embrace new challenges. Learning tools like Unity and Blender for the first time wasn’t easy, but it was incredibly rewarding. I knew going into this project that choosing to take on entirely new software within a tight timeline was ambitious, but I felt that pushing myself to try something new would be more valuable than sticking with what I already knew. It was definitely a steep learning curve, but one that left me feeling more confident in my ability to adapt and grow as a designer.

Click here or the image below to access recording of the VR experience

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