Virtual Herbarium . Cactus Story
Academic | UCLA | Summer 2021
Instructor: Yara Feghali
Category: AR App Development & First Person Interactive Game Design
Collaboration with: Ren Yatian
Virtual Herbarium questions the way we visualize & utilize large data sets, archives, & libraries. With today’s technologies we have access to an infinite amount of online data, & years of archives & knowledge at our fingertips. Algorithms that can sort, search through & identify hierarchy in that data are becoming extremely valuable because they are able to tell apart correct information from construct. In the last few years, we have seen the backlash of manipulated content, & the potency of fictitious representation. We are calling representation, reality, and artifice into question. With the catastrophic repercussions of the Crypto-Market on our environment, we here address climate change in the Anthropocene through the lens of Andrea Wulf in her book ‘The invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World’ and the work of Heide Hatry in her series “Not a Rose.” We are putting our preconceived understanding of nature and technology under scrutiny.
Virtual Herbarium dives into the exciting world of augmented reality, and games with Unity. It uses basic surface modeling in Maya, & augmented reality workflow with Unity & Photoshop. It then discovers how to model terrain in Unity & get introduced to first person interactive game design.