Resized Plastic
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
Resized Plastic is an Augmented Reality (AR) application designed to inform users about the microplastics issue, allowing interaction with its digital content on multiple scales of magnitude through the narrative device of a magnifying lens. It has been designed to provide an accessible source of information, overcoming the barriers of time and space of traditional educational tools, and improve users’ attitude towards the environmental topic, bringing life to a playful interactive environment.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
Resized Plastic is an Augmented Reality (AR) application aiming to educate about the environmental issue of microplastics. This AR application guides the user through a journey to understand the impact of microplastic, shifting through five scale dimensions, using the narrative “fantasy” of a virtual magnifying lens.
Resized Plastic is composed of two interactive elements: a paper marker and a smart device, with the AR application installed. The user will act on the marker, changing its configuration, and on the device, interacting with the digital content displayed after framing each configuration. The application is designed to recognize five different configurations of the marker, depending on the combination of two overlapped paper disks. For each configuration the application allows the user to interact with animated 3D elements, audio and written contents corresponding to each section of the experience.
- The section named The World provides global data about the current plastic production and dispersion in the environment. This step corresponds to the wider point of view on the issue, describing the global dynamics that influence microplastic pollution.
- The Ecosystem represents a cross-section of the marine environment to provide a systemic overview of how marine creatures are forced to coexist in their environment with plastics.
- Living Beings focuses on the impact of plastic on both animals and humans, connecting our everyday choices and behaviour to their environmental consequences.
- Plastic Smog displays information about the classification of microplastics. To make this information tangible, it provides a size comparison and a visual representation of the composition of microplastic samples.
- The Particle focuses on the single microplastic unit, providing information about the properties and the processes that influence the toxicity of the microplastic particle. This step corresponds to the narrowest point of view on the microplastics issue.
Key objectives for sustainability
The topic of microplastics, which is addressed by this educational experience, has been chosen for its relevance, urgency and its impacts and dependencies on our everyday life. It is possible to infer that the microplastics problem requires a systemic approach to be effectively understood and addressed. It articulates on different scales, that go from the macroscopic overview of global phenomena, such as plastic waste trade or microplastic flows through the oceans, to the microscopic properties of the single plastic particle. It requires means to effectively show how all the involved processes occur and how the different elements of the system interact with each other. Therefore, this project aimed at:
- providing a systemic overview of the microplastics issue to understand its mechanisms;
- educating the learners about their role in the system;
- connecting this information to their everyday actions.
Thanks to the potentialities of Augmented Reality, Resized Plastic can be a useful tool to address these requirements, to both improve the educational process and motivate the users to change their behaviours.
- It allows users to have control over the spatial dimension, exploring the topic of microplastic from many different points of view.
- Thanks to the combination of the digital and the physical dimensions, it allows users to visualize abstract concepts and 3D data that are transposed in real life, allowing the users to interact with them, enhancing their communication and understanding.
- Enriching the experience with playfulness and a magical atmosphere can help increase users motivation and have a stronger impact on their awareness and future choices.
The overall Resized Plastic experience has been designed to be easily performed individually by the users and the project avoided completely the use of plastic material in its realization, keeping the implementation sustainable.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The objective of the experience was to guide the learner into a journey to discover the complex system of microplastic pollution. To achieve it, the user will interact with a magnifying lens, a metaphor for the digital device camera, and a paper marker which will be rotated to zoom in and out the view. The possibility to interact with the marker through rotation can easily recall the same rotational movement required in the interaction with scientific tools, such as microscopes or binoculars.
The educational content, although it deals with alarming issues, has been set into a playful, colourful and dreamlike context, to motivate, empower and equip the learner with awareness. To respond to this challenge, the digital environment has been designed to provide a sense of play and exploration, treating the information as a living resource. In each part of the experience, the learners can interact with the virtual content, obtaining knowledge as a response to their action. A background music track unifies all the steps of the educational content and a registered voice has been inserted as a source of information for the user through the overall experience.
The aesthetics of the application is inspired by the microplastics characteristics, such as their transparency, fragmented shapes and bright colours. Thanks to the implementation of these properties into the visual contents, the experience results as playful and recognizable. The surfaces are semi-transparent, to provide a background for the written content, having at the same time a light impact on the overall visibility of the screen. The icons are monochromatic and characterized by minimal design, to avoid competing with the bright colours of the three-dimensional virtual content. Moreover, the 3D models used in the development of the application are a low-poly representation of reality. This feature effectively communicates the complexity of the system making, at the same time, an abstraction from reality.
Key objectives for inclusion
This project has been developed during 2020, when the whole world has been hit by the Covid19 pandemic. This event brought fears and uncertainties, but it also offered the possibility to slow down and weigh the decision taken by the collectiveness. Some insights emerged by this slowing process, such as the need to cope with the necessity to be educated and self-educated in isolation. Nonetheless, also in ordinary conditions, it is important to respond to the need of many to have access to information and education, especially if isolated from the standard and institutionalized educational settings. This aspect can be considered valuable for scholastic education but also for social and environmental ones, which should be guaranteed through the offering of effective and engaging tools. This would give the possibility to people to access knowledge and empower themselves to be able to respond to some of the most challenging issues which are happening in our world right now, which require a quick reaction. For sure the internet revolutionized the possibility of every single person to access information in the moment of need. But this information must be organized and conveyed effectively in order to be useful and transform themselves into actions. To achieve this goal, Resized Plastic has been designed to:
- offer a meaningful and accessible individual educational experience, that learning could easily approach from home;
- be an engaging educational experience that can be accessed with common tools, which are the user’s smart device and a marker printed on paper;
- be auto-explicatory, making the construction process of the marker easy and introducing the functionalities of the application through a step by step tutorial;
- empower the learners by motivating them to learn more about the microplastics topic and make some changes in their habits.
Innovative character
Digital technologies have proven to have a strategic role in the field of education. They represent a bridge overcoming the barriers of time and space that allows us to communicate and learn in ways it wouldn’t be possible otherwise. They help us to visualize, demonstrate and emphasize information, making knowledge more accessible and abstract thinking more tangible. Digital design can provide an open, always accessible and minimally invasive option for education, that can be applied in situations in which traditional learning can’t be effective or possible at all. The COVID19 pandemic has proven how important it is to explore and understand the potentiality of digital design for education, to collect knowledge and be prepared to take advantage of it to overcome the challenges that will expect us in the future.
Resized Plastic is an Augmented Reality (AR) Experience that combines physical experience, virtual content and imagination to provide an effective and meaningful learning experience. The elements of challenge, fantasy and curiosity contribute to the enhancement of learners’ intrinsic motivation.
- Challenge contributes to the development of competence and feelings of efficacy;
- Fantasy provides metaphors to help the learner to associate old knowledge with new concepts;
- Curiosity attracts learners’ attention and inspires the desire to bring better form to one’s knowledge structures.
Starting from these elements it is possible to take into consideration the learners’ cognitive process, the importance of a playful interactive environment and the characteristic property of AR to display and simplify complex realities. All of these aspects represent an important aid in the design of Resized Plastic as an intrinsically motivating educational experience, that improves both the efficacy and engagement of the learning activity and the possibility to have an impact on learner’s behaviour by providing positive antecedents for behavioural change.
