THESIS: Natural Futures
AR App reinventing the existing LA County Natural History Museum (NHM)
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
After a lengthy pandemic, cities are seeing a revival and reactivation of public spaces that are increasingly transformed through the presence of technology. For example, the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles is such a space that requires an enhanced mode of engaging with museum visitors. As 5G technology becomes more prevalent in public areas, we can radically rethink our interactions with our world and the role that architecture and technology will play in the future.
My thesis is an AR App designed to reinvent the existing LA County Natural History Museum (NHM) into a “Natural Futures Museum” (NFM), a gate to the future. The proposal overlays digital information onto physical objects and becomes a tool to excavate holes in the physical world to peer into the natural future. Working as an awareness tool and educational tool, which is similar to the role of a museum, the AR technology will let you become a future archeologist to explore the future we might confront based on our present. It trains people to see the world, augmenting beyond the visible wall, leaving the museum with an augmented consciousness. When they are outside the museum and retain augmentation, they can still see the materiality, the future, the past around them. AR is increasingly important for augmenting architectures as the next evolution of the section -- a live section, as if an X-ray for architecture, to let visitors look at the wall and see through the space and time.
Time is also an essential element in my thesis in terms of visual and experience design. At a first glimpse, users’ view of the App will be a more immersive and aesthetic experience to attract people’s attention. But as users get closer to the AR experience, they will also find it is disturbing and horrifying. Augmented Reality can engage you as a viewer in different ways and with varying spans of attention. Only if people really work with the augmented reality experience and go deep into it can they discover higher resolution and other layers.
TIMELINE: May-Sep 2021
TOOLS: Unity Game Engine, Universal Render Pipeline, Cinema 4D, Rhino, Houdini
Thesis Advisor: Marcelyn Gow
Cultural Agents: Marrikka Trotter
Scene 1 Cubic Sea
The first scene is in the emblematic entrance to the museum, inside the Otis Booth Pavilion. In this space, the Natural Futures Museum AR program provides a glimpse of the future of nature - a simulation of the ocean environment from below the surface of the ocean. The experience begins with a whale swimming around the facade that appears when users stand in front of the entrance.
After entering the cube, users will see the sea level rising, which is currently happening, until it overwhelms all the people staying in this area. With a glimpse, the natural future world is occupied with glowing microorganisms, a whale skull, and plastic corals. New ocean vegetation also starts growing in this space.
This experience will invite museum-goers to reflect on the possibility that all of the currently existing architecture will eventually become immersed by oceans, driven by sea-level increases caused by global warming.
Scene 1 Cubic Sea
Scene 2 Niches of Futures
The second scene, situated in the Gem and Mineral Hall, creates “future fossils” and “future minerals”, virtual entities that are designed to trigger users' imagination of what remains we will leave for the future humans as history for them to study. In order to imitate an archeologist’s working process, the app allows users to explore various types of "niches" within future fossils in the walls. By simply tapping and pinching on the screen, users will excavate niches in the physical world.
Scene 2 Niches of Futures
The design prototypes are plastic, bones of farm animals, and architectural ruins that exist in the present human's daily life. In the future, these will be transformed into fossils and become part of the minerals that exhibit to future humans (what we can see today).
At a first glimpse, the users’ view of the App will be a more immersive and aesthetic experience designed to attract people’s attention. But as users get closer to the AR experience, they will also find it is disturbing and horrifying. Augmented Reality can engage you as a viewer in different ways and with varying spans of attention.
Only if people really work with the augmented reality experience and go deep into it can they discover higher resolution and other layers. This layering creates a more profound engagement between the architecture of the museum and its technological augmentation.
Scene 3 New World
The location of the 3rd scene is the Dinasour Hall of the Museum, where people have to pass if they want to exit the building. This scene simulates a virtual wildfire happening in the surroundings. It illustrates how time and human behaviors radically change nature, thereby encouraging people to take responsibility for recovering the environment.
Virtually peeling the interior walls of the space away creates the visual effect of curtains opening, revealing desert plants stretching and sprouting from within. As the skylights and cracks gradually extend onto the upper walls and ceiling, a sky turning blue from orange color will be revealed.
At the same time, wildfire is burning virtually in the surrounding space. This virtual scenario implies the historical condition of how wildfire invaded the land in California.
Scene 3 New World
As you tap the button “FUTURE” on the screen, the scene will prompt another mode to transform the space. The place where users passed by and were scanned by the camera of the AR device will be covered by a virtual Future World. In other words, the space will change according to the user’s walking path. You can also tap the screen to add future flowers and interact with them. Are they future architectures?
This experience educates users to be aware that human behaviors can affect the environment positively to restore our nature. Finally, as if a horizon showing the present, the Hall merges different layers of time zones, the future, and the history. By shrinking the time scale, the Dinosaur Hall becomes a container of these virtual fossils and artifacts derived from human debris and makes it possible to record information similar to physical functions.
This engagement between architecture and technological augmentation provides a better educational tool for museum visitors.
live demo presentation of thesis
Clip1 of screen record video while the App is running
