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Fish Hotel is an augmented reality experience for mobile devices and an interactive multimedia projection. Fish Hotel uses location data to visualize actual coral reef quality data as a 3d animated water world inhabited by fish and coral. As a user launches the app on any mobile device, an immersive 360-degree underwater world envelops them.The AR environment is inhabited by all kinds of fish at different levels of the food chain as well as aquatic organisms including shrimp, algae, and anemones. Together, these creatures form a scintillating and interdependent ecosystem. All elements in this AR world are rendered as 3d animation accompanied by a surround sound mix of hydrophone recordings of reef habitats.
This immersive augmented reality environment responds to the health of the nearest coral reef through key indicators provided by a custom API that triangulates the device location and finds the closest reef to the device. These data indicators also include overfishing data, water temperature, water quality, and cross reef wave and water level. As multiple factors affect the reef, the resulting ecological imbalance is reflected in the application’s visualization. For example, if the water temperature is high and there is overfishing, the user will see algae growing on the coral, the anemones dying, and the fish population diminishing.
By creating a compelling virtual ecosystem, my project educates viewers about the current state of their local coral reefs while artfully exploring points of connection between the coral, its inhabitants, and the larger ecosystem reefs support. We inhabit a world where marine habitats are threatened by climate change, pollution, and overfishing. Websites that provide climate change data are challenging for a typical user to interpret and connect to our everyday lived experience. My hope is that Fish Hotel functions as a portal illuminating the liquid systems of which we are a part and on which our lives and the lives of our planetary co-inhabitants depend.