2022 Galleries

Galleries // 2022 Spark:Spring Student // BeeFriends

BeeFriends

Winner - Silver

Competition: Spark:Spring Student
Designer: Viola Huang - Designer
Design Type: Concept, Digital: Motion, Apps, Games, Spaces: architecture, interiors, landscape, social
Company / Organization / School: ArtCenter College of Design
Website: https://www.smyiola.com/
Team Members: Viola Huang, Steven Mao & Wei Heng Hsu

Beefriends set on a hiking trail in the Hollywood Hills, near the John Anson Ford Theater, employs sound-driven AR technology to offer hikers opportunities to learn about the small unseen bees they might overlook. An app guides hikers on a GPS-enabled immersive sound experience that is triggered by location and sounds. For example, the sound of running water gets louder as hikers reach the desired location. Likewise, the app will vibrant the phone as the hiker approaches the destination which contains an AR experience – such as seeing on their phone a native been lapping water from a real-live stream. Other “invisible” bees are featured via an AR experience including entering the nest of a ground bee or watching a leaf-cutting bee chewing. A native plant garden is located along the hiking trail; the app here also features AR experiences with virtual bees in the physical landscape. Hikers can post their images on social media and will be encouraged to become community scientists to record observations. The design of the plant garden uses repeated forms of leaves with circular “bites” a tell-tale sign of leaf-cutting bees. An open pavilion features these spatial forms and acts as “table tops” of varying heights.