Final Project Proposal: Our Oceans

It’s that time of the semester again: it’s time to come up with a final project idea.

I have an idea for an XR experience that’ll allow people to explore the ocean, reefs, and the various underwater ecosystems. I love the ocean, and I think this would be a cool way to get people connected to it and to care about our impacts on it. I want it to be a way for people to see what the ocean could be, and what it currently is and how our pollution impacts it.

I love that there are ways for people to see 360 video of the ocean and experience it that way, and I think I want to either play off of that idea, or make it more education-focused.

This is a huge project. I know that designing this might be way out of my league, so I want to start with a smaller, more attainable goal and then work my way up from there. For example, I can start with one scene, and do it well, and then see if I have time or skills to get more scenes done. I’m not sure if I’d want this to be used on an iPhone or as a VR experience; I see the bright sides of both. I think I would lean toward Virtual Reality because the controls might be easier to code for. However, it would be a lot of work either way.

My initial idea was to create an experience that feels like the user is in it. However, this could be too much for my limited skills and it might not be the idea that I want to go for, anyway (as I have an idea for an AR experience as well at the bottom of this post).

I want this to inspire people to care and to make a change. This relates to my work in Design Leadership on effective communication and it works with my studies in UX because I want it to be usable by all ages.

I expect quite a few challenges. I feel like I will have challenges designing each scene, and making it either low-poly so it’s easier to design but less impactful, or extremely detailed so it takes longer to design but can invite the user to really be immersed into the experience. I hope I can find a happy medium that I can be proud of.

I’ll have to use software to design my scenes, and I haven’t decided if I should continue to use Unity, or try my hand at something like Blender or Unreal Engine. I will need VR Equipment, and luckily our program has that kind of technology.

There aren’t a lot of supplies that I need to order, but there are a lot of skills I’ll need to work on. I enjoy the process of setting up scenes, but I need to brush up on my skills with code and I will need help with learning how to get my scenes usable with VR Equipment if I choose to use that route.

At this moment, I’ve only researched different 360 videos of the ocean and seen what else was out there that was working on conservation and information. I know I’ve talked about World Wildlife Fund’s Free Rivers AR app in a few other blog posts, but I think that it’s a really good resource for me to get to know how they’re relaying information. It also gives me and idea to utilize AR instead of VR and make it more like their design. I have to research and unpack this as well, though.

WWF Free Rivers AR App. Image from WWF.

My idea for a “chunk” of the ocean that people can study and look at, as inspired by the Free Rivers app.

Either way, I’m excited to research the ocean and its creatures, and I’m excited to see where this goes!