[G4] - HomeGrown

Inspiration

Inspired by a previous project of overgrowing a surreal environment with plants and foliage, we expanded the idea into Mixed Reality to help people identify edible mushrooms from the safety of their own homes. Lord knows we're not getting WiFi in the forest!

There's a current uptick in people foraging for mushrooms but general knowledge about what is safe is not as widespread. This is mainly due to people learning on social media. Additionally, visual identification with pictures through apps is insufficient and therefore, a more experiential approach is needed. That's where mixed reality and learning-by-doing can help along the way.

What it does

The demo randomly generates clusters of safe and harmful mushrooms in your current environment that are not easily distinguishable. Step-by-step guidance teaches the user different identification techniques and provides information about foraging etiquette and necessary general knowledge about mushrooms and their habitats.

How we built it

We used the Unreal Engine 5 and the Meta Presence SDK to provide a mixed-reality experience.

Challenges we ran into

Unreal's Meta integration is not as thorough as Unity and we still need to implement mushroom clusters being occluded by objects in the world.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Randomly spawning a mushroom cluster on someone's head! But seriously, we're proud of creating a framework that can be expanded with additional identification techniques and information while having a light-hearted magic-realism approach.