Pixelplants

Pixelplants is a speculative AR art installation conceptually based on the traditional walled garden. 

The installation tries to do three new things:
1. Direct foot traffic in Physical space using Virtual content
2. Encourage ppl to care about a patch of land, and visit this, based on Augmented Content
3. Induce a sense of ownership over a physical site using digital content.

The artwork invites participants to plant virtual seeds and view the resulting PIXELPLANTS in Augmented Reality (AR) through their mobile device. The virtual plants may be customised, and grow down to the ground from an overhead datum based on preset algorithms. Eventually, the PIXELPLANTS form thickets of virtual vegetation that define pixellated ‘walls,’ reminiscent of the hedging in traditional walled gardens; and the aggregation of these walls defines a maze. Should a user accidentally walk into the ‘No-Go Zones’ of the virtual maze, haptic feedback from their mobile device will disrupt their AR experience, effectively directing people through physical space using virtual cues.
PIXELPLANTS encourages repeat visits to a real-world site by stoking participants’ interest in the plight of their virtual PIXELPLANTS. The artwork proposes the Mixed Reality equivalent of the whimsical flower-plucking game ‘S/he loves me/ loves me not’, which traditionally manifests through the plucking of one daisy’s petal for each spoken phrase. PIXELPLANTS similarly invites participants to ask a YES/NO question of their chosen seed before planting, with the number of flowers produced algorithmically by the time the plant reaches the ground resulting in a YES/ NO response. Coupled with participants’ ability to customise their PIXELPLANT by assigning it colours and characters, this promise of an answer encourages participants to return to the same physical space, traversing a virtual maze in the process.

Ultimately, PIXELPLANTS seeks to demonstrate that public space may be impacted by geolocated virtual concent in ways as yet unexplored by the architects and city planners who shape its physical attributes. 

This project was presented at the Living Futures Oceania Summit 2021.