BANANOLOGY

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  BANANOLOGY: Banana Knowledge for EVERYONE.

Inspiration

Despite technological development has provided its inhabitants with an abundance of information and dismantled physical boundaries within communication, we felt the prevalent misunderstandings and a lack of communications between individuals within contemporary society. There, as we were thinking of a common subject that many people will be able to feel related, we saw bananas in the grocery market. Bananas are one of the most widely spread fruit worldwide, loved by every generations of people. We thought bananas will be a good contents that everyone can relate themselves to.

What it does

“BANANOLOGY” is to bring back a sense of community throughout countries, cultures, and generations by engaging a variety of audiences with a communal topic: bananas. Bananas are one of the world’s most loved fruits and its most widespread fruit. By creating an experience that incorporates the well-loved fruit, humor, and curiosity, we seek to provide our audience with starting points where they can feel more interested in those who are from different cultures and generations.

“BANANOLOGY” is an Augmented Reality entertainment content that incorporates machine learning and storytelling. Throughout the experience, users will receive interesting, intercultural, and inter-generational knowledge on bananas. Through presenting fun reads, interesting and diverse culture, and personal to environmental benefits around our favorite lunch box fruit, bananas, we bring inclusion, and opportunities for our audience to form communities around their favorite lunch box fruit, bananas.

How we built it

The whole project is design-driven. We wanted to provide a solution for the problem of prevalent misunderstandings and a lack of communications between individuals within contemporary society. Therefore, we incorporated Augmented Reality technology with the prevalent sns card new platform.

We firstly decided what functions we were going to realize and then learned Spark AR and APIs which might help us to make it polished. It was the first time that we had done a project with Spark AR, so we went to official reference websites and watched some Youtube tutorials. Our main technical goal was to identify bananas in our daily life, which required a well-learned machine. Though we failed to make use of a data-set, we have finally got a functional demo with certain bananas. Once we figured out the program part we started to build our own visual assets which support our design concept.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we ran into included object recognition of the demo, and creating contents that everyone can enjoy.

In terms of technology, we tried Teachable Machine and Tensorflow. Unfortunately the Teachable Machine was not able to output an object with its spatial information and Tensorflow was recondite for us to manage in a short time as design students. Finally, we built a demo which could recognize photos of certain bananas with a built-in function of Spark AR. We had also met problems when iterating our design concept since bananas were too general, and it was hard to find out points that could be attractive to more people. We searched on the internet and talked about our ideas with different groups of people to make decisions.

In terms of contents, We made sure that each content correctly identifies a culture so that every audience will have a sense of inclusiveness, toned the level of seriousness down so that the contents were more enjoyable, and curated our contents in a way that our audience will start to feel interested in other cultures and generations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the most aspiring characteristics of Augmented Reality technology is that it’s contents exist in both tangible reality and digital environments. Through this characteristic of existing between the two platforms of contemporary life, “BANANOLOGY” seeks to arouse curiosity, bring entertainment, and provide its audience with an opportunity to communicate with those who are from a different culture, and a different generation.

What we learned

From the aspect of techniques, we have all learned a lot as design students. Spark AR is a quick and simple tool to make AR demos, which is so helpful for prototyping and user testing its public platform support. Besides, we looked insight into the information of bananas which had taken us to the relationship between generations, history of countries and nations, and even natural rules of species. We now have a new way to observe and comprehend the world.

What's next for BANANOLOGY

BANANOLOGY is to keep increasing its repository of contents so that as many audience will be able to enjoy the experience feeling their culture and generation included. We are also planning to not limit our topic only to bananas but also into other fruits and ingredients one can easily find in any grocery market.

Built With

• selfmadeuiinteraction
• sparkar