Haptic Playback
2021 Seed is a world-AR experience featuring a virtual plant that grew throughout the year of 2021. Throughout 2021, the experience would display a different quote on each new day. If you launch the experience today, you can see 365 days of growth happen within a few seconds. However, the experience offers controls that let you revisit how the plant looked throughout the year. 2021 Seed is inspired by toys like the Tamagotchi as well as recent trends in dynamic art.
The design process starts with a simple sketch showing what the desired outcome should be early on in the year as well as what the plant should look like on day 365.
Next, there is the process of modelling and texturing the plant in the 3D software, Blender. This gives us the final appearance of the plant on day 365. To get the appearance of the other 364 days, we work backwards and apply scaling animations to the plant stems. This is done by placing deformation bones on the stems and animating their scale. This gives us an animation with 365 frames: one for each day of the year. We then export the plant as a 3D object file and import it into the AR project.
In Meta Spark, we implement controls to let the user place the plant in their physical environment. We then play the growing animation after the plant has been placed. However, we limit how far the animation plays by checking what the current day of 2021 is. So if it is the 87th day of the year, we only play the first 87 frames of the animation. Our code also links the current day to a specific quote. We display this quote on the model's signboard. We also implement controls to let the user look through all the currently available frames of animation.
If a user opens the experience after 2021, they will be able to view all 365 frames of animation and get a reminder of the year that was.
Try the experience yourself