Sprout: Delightful Gardening for the Octopus Garden

4 min readMay 4, 2016

What is Sprout?

Sprout is a mobile, desktop, and augmented reality app that simulates the experience of gardening for kids and novice gardeners. The Sprout platform incorporates the use of both a digital app as well as a physical marker. The purpose of Sprout is to help the Octopus Garden engage Pittsburgh gardeners during the winter months by training them how to garden via an Octopus-Garden-themed game.

Sprout not only teaches the next generation of Pittsburgh gardeners how to grow a plant, it also serves as a gardening reference guide for Pittsburghers during the summer planting months. Additionally, the Sprout markers serve as a public sign to visitors of the Octopus Garden that someone loves and cares for the Garden and the plant that it marks.

How Sprout Works

The user registers with Sprout and receives a QR-code enabled Sprout marker (off-site)
The user can then personalize his/her marker before planting it in the Octopus Garden and syncing (connecting) it to his/her Sprout account (on-site)
After syncing, the user can check on his/her plant remotely using the desktop or mobile app. Octavia provides information about what is going on at each stage of Sprout plant growth and alerts the user of any necessary actions to take care of the Sprout plant (off-site)
To motivate users to retain a connection to the Octopus Garden, Sprout requires users to stop by the Gardento unlock certain features of the game using gestural on-site interactions (on-site)
Certain gestural on-site interactions, like harvesting, utilize augmented reality elements to make the game more engaging and delightful for users (on-site)
Once the winter is over, Sprout becomes a personalized database of useful information about Pittsburgh specific planting so that users can refer to it while growing real plants during the spring and summer (on/off-site)

Sprout Interactions

On-Site Interactions

Fertilizing, pruning, and watering gestures.

Only the harvesting task must be done on-site at the Octopus Garden, but additional on-site interactions complement gameplay to make the Sprout gardening experience more delightful for the user.

To fertilize, the user shakes the phone over the Sprout plant.

To prune, the user taps the highlighted leaves in AR mode to snip.

To water, the user tilts the phone over the Sprout plant.