Overview
DONO: Giving Tree. A new way to experience giving.
DONO is an augmented reality donation platform available through mobile that helps boost fundraising for global causes by offering supporters a gamified, community experience once they donate.
Using Unity AR Foundation, we challenged ourselves to design and build a prototype for an accessible and scalable fundraising tool that anyone could experience anytime and anywhere.
Inspiration
For this hackathon, we challenged ourselves to rethink the giving and donating experience and question what it looks like and how XR could be leveraged to improve this. Much fundraising for global causes -- like the Australian wildfires -- happens through traditional news and media, but little is focused on the user’s experience when donating. So how can we change this and integrate components of gamification, excitement and sensation?
How does it work
- With DONO Giving Tree, users can explore global causes (currently fundraising) and join them by donating and see how their donation affects the cause.
- Inspired by Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree, supporters are invited to leave a personal message and place their donation leaf onto the tree.
- Once complete, Explore Mode is unlocked and supporters can walk around to discover and read personal messages left on the tree from fellow supporters around the world.
- When the cause reaches its funding goal, cause supporters are invited to come back and watch the AR tree in FULL bloom.
How can it be used and scaled
With the DONO AR platform, non-profit organizations and global causes will be able to sustainably boost fundraising efforts by offering everyday people with a donating experience that is fun and accessible.
Sourced Assets
Free pre-built 3D models (flowers & mushrooms) were sourced as supporting materials surrounding the DONO tree to enhance the user’s experience during the unlocked experience as they explore the AR environment. This serves to communicate the art of the possible and could be custom and specific to the cause selected, such as Australian wildlife.
Challenges Faced
- With so many exciting and creative ideas from the entire team, it was not easy to prioritize features. We had to weigh them by function, time, passion and cohesion with the overall product story.
- We didn’t have a graphic/UX designer or 3D modeler, but this was an open opportunity for exploration, resourcefulness & learning
- We spent Day 1 building a marker-based AR using Vuforia until we realized end of day that UX flow makes more sense if it the user is not required to have a marker. We quickly adapted to markerless.
- Design and wireframing of experience was very iterative, but ultimately this helped optimize the user flow
- Diving into development before having final design wireframes ready was tough; this meant sometimes we’d have to re-build features or re-design to ensure collective alignment
- Exploring Azure Spatial Anchors didn’t work to our needs so we stuck with AR foundation plane detection in Unity
- Coding while exhausted
Learnings
- 3D modeling using Blender
- UX designing for AR experiences and environments
- Procedural generation of plant model using Unity
- Taking an idea and narrowing down to which XR technology to use (AR vs VR, what devices, what AR platform to use)
- Being resourceful and stretching team effort when you don’t have sufficient technical experience
- How to size down a big idea and fit it into a weekend by continuous prioritization
- Scaling for both mobile Android & IOS devices
- Designing something in XR that could be scalable to meet the masses
Future features
- Explore other causes and their DONO trees in AR
- Non-profit cause registration and validation
- Donation payment processing and/or tie into other existing donation platforms
- Share with friends and when they join, prompt to create team branch on the DONO AR tree
- Mutil-player live session
- Monitor trees from past donations
- Port to VR or other AR platforms
- Sliding scale to see evolution of tree growth / fund growth
- Develop into learning/news platform for current causes that can be routinely explored by users
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