{ar}borescence

In 2021 the ANU School of Art and Design partnered with Mod to research site-specific natural feature tracking.

{ar}boresence is all about enjoying and engaging with our wonderful natural heritage through public AR artworks. {ar}borence showcases environmental data through AR artworks.

Our prototype focuses on one specific tree at Sullivans Creek that runs through ANU’s Canberra campus. To activate artistic interpretation of creek flow data, the work combines a radial sequence of hand-drawn animations and state-of-the-art markerless object tracking.

With the help of an Epic Games Mega Grant we showed how AR artwork can be efficiently produced, anchored to heritage-listed trees and discovered outdoors using nothing more than a smartphone. We scanned trees as if they were QR codes!

The project aims to create AR object markers for specific significant trees in Canberra’s National Arboretum - a 250 hectare collection of forests and gardens - and provide this capability to other sites world-wide.