U.S. Virtual Garden

Inspiration

We take inspirations from virtual exhibitions and design the website so that the specimens can be easily explored.

What it does

The exhibition introduces visitors to the world of plants by first offering them a curated collection to get start. It also encourage self-exploration by gamifying the exhibition walk through with hidden achievements in random pages which visitors can collect to earn badges.

How we built it

We use React and Bootstrap to build the website and R to compute basic statistics. We use Groq to generate description of plants to fill in the missing descriptions. Dashboard is created with LookerStudio.

Challenges we ran into

We were not able to incorporate the whole dataset into the demo, so we only sample a small subset of the dataset to display in the exhibition. We're also unsure of the uniqueness of the dataset, as there are duplication in the ID field.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the incorporation of AI description to circumvent the missing values in description field of the dataset. We're also proud of the user-friendly interface that we designed.

What we learned

We learn that designing a virtual exhibition to imitate the physical one is challenging. Our visitors come from different backgrounds, so it is difficult to determine which approach to storytelling and presentation would be the best suit for the experience.

What's next for Virtual Garden

Expand the collection to beyond the U.S., as well as offer a comprehensive statistics that give visitors a complete picture of the world of plants. We would like to create a page for dashboard that talks about the changes in plant habitats and conditions over time.