Project Overview
We often disconnect what we know about Climate Change from how we choose to live our lives. But what if immersive storytelling could break this pattern of behaviour? Could we REWILD the planet for future generations?
REWILD Our Planet is a multi-sensory, multiplayer AR experience. As a world first in social and persistent AR, REWILD Our Planet repairs the connection between human beings and the planet. The experience shows that it is possible to reverse the effects of climate change if we work together as one.
REWILD Our Planet combines powerful content from the Netflix Original Series Our Planet with the WWF’s Voice for the Planet campaign. The experience uses cutting-edge animation and modelling to create realistic 3D landscapes. Each landscape connects with a different Our Planet episode - Frozen, Forest, Grassland and Ocean.
The aim was to give participants a newfound digital voice - to spark cross-generational conversations about how to rewild, rebalance and restore Earth’s diverse biomes.
The experience launched at three renowned venues: ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, Dolby Studio in New York City and We The Curious in Bristol (UK).
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Core Partners: Netflix, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Google, ArtScience Museum by Marina Bay Sands
Supporting Partners: Arup, Dolby Soho, We the Curious, University of Melbourne
Creatives: Trent Clews-de Castella, Rayyan Roslan, Joseph Purdam, Samuel Tate Goudie
Operations & Logistics: Steven Kounnas & Dean Kominek
Developers: Lachlan Sleight, Lucas Hehir, Ben Ferns, Yu-Jen Lu, Ian Ulpiano, Phill Moon, Jesse Harrison, Sana A. Siddiqui
3D Animation & Modelling: Blair Burke, Trisha Chhabra, Gauthier Basse, Hoa Thi Thanh Bui
VFX: Broomstick, Steven Cheah
Platform & Crater Design: Hustwaite Butcher, Travis Gemmill, Luke Neil
Sound Design: Josh Mitchell
Behind-the-Scenes: Rush Entertainment Group, Ursula Lane-Mullins, Eneasi Teaupa, Gemma Hannan, Kick Off Communications
Project Context
At the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, Sir David Attenborough and WWF called for a New Deal for Nature and People in 2020. They urged key decision makers from across the globe to take action on climate change, sustainable development and nature. Their idea is that with collective action it is possible to reverse the momentum of global ecological loss.
As a champion for the WWF, PHORIA visualised this need for collective action through immersive storytelling. With only three months to build an Augmented Reality experience, our brief was to create an experience that would highlight the solutions as much as the problems.
Using world first technology, we ideated a bespoke application to help drive a positive global impact. This followed in the footsteps of Into the Wild, Google Zoo’s AR project with ArtScience Museum and Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.
Project Innovation
REWILD Our Planet is a world first social AR experience that translates the WWF’s core mission and world-class footage from Netflix’s Our Planet into an interactive experience.
With PHORIA’s product CAPTUR3D, the team 3D scanned and aligned a digital twin of each exhibition. By generating a virtual clone of each venue, we were able to overlay the space with augmented digital content. This meant that REWILD Our Planet could operate across three cities at the same time, all launching within the same week.
With these foundations in place, we were able to leverage Google’s ARCore software to make the experience multiplayer. The lightbox crater at the centre of the experience helped to align and contextualise the AR gameplay. Meanwhile an emotive soundscape, adapted from Our Planet by Arup Melbourne, intensified the immersion with the support of sensory lighting and platform design.
We built the user journey around a compassion-driven, visual narrative, so that the experience would not be limited by language barriers. We kept the installation design minimalistic to ensure accessibility for all ages and abilities.
Design Challenge
With REWILD Our Planet, we encouraged participants to learn, play and act. We wanted them to embrace a renewed sense of optimism about environmental conservation efforts.
Learn: A world first spatial-multiplayer voting system meant participants could vote with their feet. By standing in the zones corresponding to each biome, participants decided together which biome to explore. Each realistic 3D landscape would display unique weather patterns and wild animal encounters. It would then be dewilded, the substance texture turning from visceral imagery to sparse expanses. This direct link between physical presence and virtual dewilding aimed to capture how human beings contribute to the degradation of the planet.
Play: To rewild the landscape, participants needed to combine efforts by moving around the space and interacting with each other. The more they collaborated, the faster they were able to rebalance their chosen biome.
Act: At the end of the experience, participants were asked to join David Attenborough in making a pledge for the planet. However, what made this unique was that these pledges persisted between experiences. Current participants could connect with existing pledges, suspended in virtual space. The virtual pledging feature helped to symbolise the idea of collective responsibility. But more importantly, it also showed how collective empowerment can make positive change for the world.
Sustainability
To help achieve the WWF’s goal of reaching 1 billion people worldwide, we generated a campaign to promote each activation of REWILD Our Planet.
In the lead up to the initial launch date, we released our official trailer through Netflix’s Facebook channel and our experience poster. Both featured the biomes and environmental content from the AR experience.
We launched dedicated landing pages for the ArtScience Museum, Dolby Soho and We The Curious. Our press release distribution in NYC and Singapore alone garnered an audience of approximately 111.8 million, according to NewsWire.
Dolby Soho also released a 3D Tour of their exhibition with our CAPTUR3D platform.
The REWILD Our Planet media launch at the ArtScience Museum was attended by over 50 media influencers. To date, 158 features have been published about the experience, including features from the Daily Mail, spot.ph and Yahoo SG. We also participated in an exclusive interview with The Australian Online and a TV segment with ChannelNews Asia.
Since the launch, the installation at the ArtScience Museum has been visited by approximately 250 people per day. The Dolby Soho installation received 3,000 visitors in its opening weekend alone. We the Curious, with a direct educational market of 8-18 year olds, received great feedback. To date, more than 4,000 hours of engagement has taken place with more than 12,000 users having gone through REWILD Our Planet.
We have not released any data or personal information in relation to REWILD Our Planet for any of the installations.
All data collected through the installation is voluntarily provided by participants and in compliance with recent GDPR standards.
Participants were able to voluntarily make pledges with the WWF’s Voice for the Planet campaign, and could opt-in to receive our campaign emails via signup.
User feedback and interaction design research will be performed to help quantify the overall impact of REWILD Our Planet. We will investigate AR as an immersive technological experience that can help drive behavioural change for greater climate action, environmental awareness and conservation support.
Social and Community-Oriented Design - Experience
Social design applies a design methodology and intervention to tighten the social fabric that holds us together. Addressing issues of social inequality, such as poverty or social isolation, social design is the pathway to a more just and sustainable society. Community-oriented design is a human-centered and participatory design practice that emphasises the betterment of local communities through the improvement of public facilities, equipment, identity and experience.
The experience design category celebrates designed journeys, services, events and processes where the focus is placed on the experiences of the user. Consideration is given according to the design context and need, design innovation and the application of human centred design principles.
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