Jade

Intro

I spent my childhood playing outside, camping, and exploring my neighborhood woods. My mom was also an avid plant owner. My brothers and I would spend a large chunk of our summers preparing the vegetable garden in the backyard. I would tend to the house plants and watch them grow, making little observations and discovering their needs. I developed a green thumb and found peace and joy out of this hobby. As I brought my plants to college I found that the connection I had with plants was not a common one.

Problem

Many people claim that they can’t have a house plant because they will kill it. They will say “Oh, I kill plants” or “I always forget to water them.” Even when I show people how to water my plants, they don’t always understand how much water to give and what variables lead to a healthy, happy plant.

Goal

Create an AR App that helps plant owners develop a relation with and care for their plant family.

Plant Profiles

Jade will automatically recognize when there is a new plant in your house and prompt the user to add it to the family. The user just needs to open the plant profile, tap ‘add plant’ and give it a name.

Why do house plants die?

Watering

How much water a plant needs/gets is the biggest factor that determines the health of a plant. It is also the main interaction we have with them (think of it like feeding a dog). So I chose watering as the core feature of this app. Augmented Reality allows Jade to display real-time feedback on how much water to give each plant. When you enter watering mode from your plant family menu there will be different waypoints set for each plant. The waypoints will be displayed on the edge of the screen marking the direction that plant is in.

Alerts

All the other health issues a plant might have are uncommon enough that I lumped them into one overarching feature that alerts the user when something is awry with the plant. These can include amount of light, soil, disease, bugs or when plants can be propagated. The user can access the alert by pulling up the plant profile to gather more information about what the issue is and how to address it.

Part of the family

Okay so now that the plant is alive and happy, how can we create a connection between the plant owner and their plants? One way to create these connections is by giving your plants a name. We name and develop emotional connections with pets, so why not plants? They are alive and have needs in the same way a dog does, just less mobile. I also created a Plant Family feature so the user has an organized list of all their plants

Conclusion

There are different considerations I had to make when designing in AR compared to a web or app experience. I started sketches in a rectangular environment but realized that our field of view is circular. So my mockups are displayed in a circle meant to imitate the human field of view. Because UI elements are intended to persist in view, big elements would block a dangerous amount of the user’s vision. When referencing objects in a physical space like a plant can be out of view of the user.