community gARden is a collaborative, immersive gardening experience. This hybrid physical-digital environment invites users to plant a seed in a physical flower pot and add it to a digital scene. When the user adds sunlight and water through their physical interactions, a unique flower grows in the pot. The user can take their physical pot home with them and grow their seed in the physical environment as well.

Plant a seed and watch your flower bloom! Visitors were asked to contribute a virtual flower to our collaborative garden. First, they planted a seed inside a terracotta pot and covered it in soil. Then, they brought the seed to the immersive environment and watch a sprout appear in the scene.

Adding sunshine and water helped the flower bloom. This was achieved by visitors touching the moon to transform night to day and touching a cloud to make rain.

This immersive experience was designed for exhibition at the 2021 Jacobs Winter Design Showcase at UC Berkeley. The immersive environment was designed in Unity, motion tracking and detection was accomplished with two Kinect V2 cameras, and used RoomAlive Toolkit from Microsoft to pull the Kinect data into Unity.

We used two projectors in the space to minimize shadows and two Kinect cameras to avoid occluding body parts to maximize body tracking.