Project Brief

Create an engaging user experience for Penn State’s Arboretum based on the hidden world of its pollinator garden. 

The Arboretum was extremely generous in letting us choose any subject, so long as it highlighted the garden’s intricate biome built to attract pollinators. They also wanted it to be supplemenatary and encourage visitors to look closer at the environment.

We decided to focus on honey bees and their roles through their lives, teaching people through an AR game that was fun and informative, while also allowing players to tour around the gardens.

As a player enters the garden and downloads the app, they roll one of six roles, which each have four minigames, or tasks, they must complete. As they walk around the garden, their phone will react to locations in the garden and be prompted to play a task, which are scored based on speed. After the tasks are completed, players can view their total score and real life paralells for their tasks.

The six roles are based on the worker honey bees’ roles and tasks based on their jobs during life. While many tasks repeat, as most bees spend their time maintaining the hive, two roles have unique task spreads, though repeated minigames. 

Our visual style uses gradients to create an otherworldly effect, to differentiate human vision from bee vision, our entire brand based around bees’ favorite colors. For the AR game, we created 3D models in Blender without texture for a more gamified look.