towar/Low carbon labs
Role: Creative Producer, Game Designer, Programmer
An augmented reality research project exploring educational game design using Niantic's Lightship ARDK.
Low Carbon Labs is an augmented reality resource management game. Working solo or as a team, players collect a range of resources from the world around them from the ground, plants, and sky. Some resources are nonrenewable and others renewable. Using the resources they collect, the players must make strategic choices about how to build carbon capture systems to restore their environment to balance and keep it from falling into environmental collapse.
Inspiration: Can we use real world AR to help the next generation consider and understand what renewable and non-renewable resources are and how to use both to build a sustainable (energy) future?
Successful strategies for getting to a sustainable future will require the use of both renewable and nonrenewable resources. By creating an immersive simulation that connects these concepts to the player's real world, we hope to inspire greater engagement and ideas towards finding practical climate solutions.
Prototype: The project started as a demo for the augmented reality design and development class I teach at University of Maryland. My TA, Christopher Maxey, and myself set out to test some of the features of Niantic's Lightship ARDK (augmented reality developer kit) before introducing it to the students.
We called the initial demo "TowAR." We designed it as a competitive block building game that sought to create a compelling AR experience that created unique interactions between the players and the physical world around them.
Game Design: I was inspired by the recent progress being made towards building carbon capture systems. Like many promising new climate-related technologies, while they hold the tantalizing promise of effectively sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, they currently consume a lot of energy and pull out relatively little carbon.
Resource Management: For Low Carbon Labs, the player must decide what kind of energy to use to build their carbon capture system. Rely solely on renewable energy and you are less likely to collect the resources you need in time before the CO2 level gets too high, rely solely on non-renewables and the rate that the CO2 level goes up will increase faster than the capture systems can pull it from the atmosphere.
Game Mechanics: the primary mechanics in both the TowAR prototype and the Low Carbon Labs demo moved the player between three interactive modes: gathering resources in the environment, selecting a piece of the carbon capture system to place, and placing that piece on the game board.
Resource gathering using semantic segmentation. The area the system recognizes as trees is split into discrete hexagon game tiles. As a renewable resource, the hexagon "grows back" after 10 seconds. We use the ground semantic channel for non-renewable resources, these game tiles can be gathered only once.
Game board: Due to time constraints, we used a game board format to make the placement, animation, and connection of the capture system pieces easier programmatically. (Rather than use the physical ground, for instance.) This choice also made it easier for the player to understand how to place the pieces together correctly.
Programming:
As the project lead and game designer, I took on a number of programming tasks to assist the lead developer and to prototype different game mechanics and functionality.
Inventory System: Using Christopher Maxey's inventory system for TowAR as a starting place, I programmed a new inventory system for Low Carbon Labs using scriptable objects. This allowed for a greater degree of control over the relationship between capture pieces costs, their function, and their effect on the CO2 level.
CREDITS
Creative Director, Game Designer, Programmer: Jonathan David Martin
Development Lead (Low Carbon Labs): Xiaohan Wu
Development Lead (TowAR): Christopher Maxey
3D Artist: Molly C. Carroll::