Climate Lens

This immersive AR experience will illustrate the future impact of a global temperature rise of 4ºC and how it will affect local communities, cities, and populations.

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Inspiration

This project was inspired by the drastic changes we have already started to see from a rising global temperature and the power of augmented reality. We felt that if we could create an immersive experience of the impact of global warming, it would inspire change.

What it does

It visualizes the impact of Sea Level Rise at the San Francisco Ferry building through AR.

How we built it

The project was conceptualized, designed and built in 10 days for this competition using Figma (conceptualize and wire framing), Adobe (photoshop, illustrator, premier), Unity and Shader Graph, Xcode (and several trips to the Ferry Building).

Challenges we ran into

Working with Unity and their version control presented a number of challenges but was finally able to find a stable version that could support AR, ARCore, API and creating the water effect on an M1 machine. Needed more time to better understand the API. We also ran into issue submitting for android version of the app with google play store and did not have enough time to fix the issue for the competition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the 10-day turnaround we had on this project going from sketch to a functioning AR Experience.

What we learned

We learned more about ARCore, Geospatial API and its capabilities for localization and anchoring. We've worked with Apple's Geoanchor framework so it was interesting to see the differences and similarities. Also learned about shader graph in Unity to create the water effect.

What's next for Climate Lens

We hope to push a version out to Android and add more locations with more compelling experiences. We'd like to investigate further the types of experiences we may develop through this API (meshing, occlusion, relocalizing vertically - still not sure how the demo video from Google that shows flowers climbing up the Ferry Building was created). Overall, we're hopeful that this technology can help tell more compelling stories that can have increased impact on people's awareness global warming and climate change. We're excited that this capability is available to multiple platforms, supporting larger breadth of hardware from various manufacturers, allowing access to a larger number of users for this experience.

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