Sea Change

Status: Completed

Project Type: Mobile app demo

Platform: Android

Role: Ideation, market/user research, storyboarding, UX/UI design, app development, coding

Software: Unity 3D, Vuforia

Abstract

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 epicenter 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.

Motivation

There are approximately 14,000 polar bears left on Earth. This statistic is a dramatic drop from 1995, when the recorded population of the polar bears was 21,000 (Polar Bear Science, 2017). Fast fashion plays a large role in the creation of climate change, as the fashion industry is the second largest pollutant in the world, right behind the oil and gas industry (Mochni, 2017). 60 to 80 percent of the polar bear population is located in Canada, which is why my team and I believed that using polar bears to showcase the effects of climate change was the most effective way to start out what could be a series of climate change Virtual Reality applications (WWF, 2019). The motivation behind Sea Change was:

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 need of an app like Sea Change so that she could visualize the gravity of the climate change crisis in “real” life.

Storyboarding

The conceptual framework of our app consisted of mechanics, aesthetics, technology, and narrative. Recognizing the importance of storytelling in our app, my team and I created a narrative that shaped the user journey of our mobile application. This narrative was first made tangible through the method of storyboarding, producing a narrative that consisted of (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.

Challenges

Building a relatively immersive experience as our first-ever Unity project provided ample opportunity to come across roadblocks and have to reiterate our techniques and ideas. The main challenges were as follows:

Unity learning curve; we had staggered levels of understanding, which sometimes made it difficult to collaborate

The lack of collaboration-friendliness in Unity—having to work on isolated segments made it difficult to effectively see how our teammates were doing

Vuforia tracking and image target co-operation in a 360 experience

Spatial awareness and relative sizing

The 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.

Brianne James