Exploration Station
100 Island Challenge:
Overview
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Exploration Station is a hologram exhibit at Birch Aquarium that strives to spread awareness for the health of our coral reef ecosystems
The combination of Google Earth and Leap Motion (hand-tracking) technology allows visitors to manipulate the globe and learn about the 100 Island Challenge with an emphasis on user interaction
Justin Duong
Andrew Nguyen
Aditya Srivinasan
Ludi Duhay
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My roles
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Visual Designer
Design Subteam Lead
The team
Michelle Layton
Yuji Heid
Matt Nakpawan
Manwinder Uppal
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Duration
10 weeks
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Context
Continuing from the previous team's progress on this project, my team of engineers, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists was tasked to implement an interactive component to the exhibit using Google Earth and Leap Motion technology.
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​Our goal was to effectively introduce the 100 Island Challenge, a mission launched at Scripps Institutions of Oceanography to assess coral reef health across the globe, and ultimately spread awareness among visitors.
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The following rendering shows the internal and external exhibit space at Birch.
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Created by Yuji Heid
Poster Session
I created a poster for our team poster session in which we presented our goals for the quarter to other students and instructors from the Global Ties program which we were a part of.
User Research
After conducting preliminary user research (with Manwinder) on-site at the exhibit, I put together a few Google forms to streamline later information gathered on the observations, interviews, and data collection.
Title & Placard
To increase visitor engagement with our exhibit, I created mockups of potential titles to place above the exhibit.
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I referenced a nearby non-tank exhibit when drafting a title, maintaining the same color palette and font.
I also drafted a placard to provide general information about the 100 Island Challenge.
Google Earth
Overlay
To showcase all the islands related to the 100 Island Challenge, our software team made use of an existing overlay with all the exact locations of the islands.
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I determined that the most fitting color for the overlay markers is red-orange as it is complimentary but also provides ample contrast.
Educational
Video
As a team we decided to create an education video that would play simultaneously alongside a gesture instructions video.
Once I collaborated with a team member (Aditya) to form the script, I selected the footage to be used, aided in the voice recording process (Michelle and Yuji), and shared the files to be edited together (Yuji and Ludi).
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Here is our first draft of the video:
Animation
Here is the instructional gesture video I created that was presented at Birch: