Balboa Park Alive!
Balboa Park Alive!
Balboa Park Alive! is an AR mobile app that brings San Diego’s Balboa Park to life by offering immersive, interactive experiences focused in the area’s rich biodiversity. Aimed at families, the app promotes environmental stewardship and conservation through engaging activities like cultivating native plants, releasing butterflies, and simulating pollinator behavior. Hear from the team behind this innovation. The invisible threads of our natural world — the ultraviolet signals guiding pollinators, the chemical messages between plants, the microscopic relationships sustaining entire ecosystems — shape life in profound ways we cannot see. After all, we cannot empathize with that which we cannot imagine; we cannot protect that which we cannot name. Location-based augmented reality (AR) offers a powerful lens to reveal these hidden dimensions of nature, making the invisible visible and transforming human perception of ecological reality.
In the San Diego/Tijuana region, which stands at a remarkable crossroads of distinct ecoregions, one of Earth’s richest concentrations of biodiversity thrives, yet many young people — particularly those in underserved communities with limited access to green spaces — remain unfamiliar with the plants, animals, insects, and fungi that make life here vibrantly possible. “Balboa Park Alive!” seeks to reveal these invisible dimensions of our local ecosystem through an engaging mobile AR experience, making abstract ecological relationships tangible and immediate for visitors.
Drawing inspiration from Prof. Scott Fisher’s pioneering work in outdoor spatial computing — which focused on empowering users to author and access location-based virtual content in unstructured environments — we leveraged Niantic’s Lightship ARDK framework, Mapbox SDK, Visual Positioning System (VPS), and MediaPipe Hands for natural interaction, creating precise AR experiences that encourage families to discover local flora and fauna.
Balboa Park Alive! seeks to bridge this gap through three key approaches: First, by fostering perspective-taking, imagination, and curiosity. Users experience life through a pollinator’s perspective — following a honeybee’s waggle dance navigation and viewing the world in the ultraviolet hues that attract bees and butterflies. The app encourages inquiry-based learning, inviting users to experiment with how different plant species might survive across riparian, oasis, desert, and coastal ecosystems. Second, by promoting ecological literacy through a combination of direct experience and in-depth content. The app features companion book chapters accessible through the interface, creating a novel approach to environmental education. While traditional learning involves integrating text-based information with existing knowledge, “Balboa Park Alive!” adds the dimension of direct personal experience. Through AR-based prompts and immersive content, users can map concepts from the text to their firsthand observations, potentially creating deeper emotional connections than possible through printed material alone. Third, by offering a shared activity that motivates conversation and outdoor exploration for adults and children. Through the app’s collaborative features and interactive AR experiences, families engage together in discovering and understanding local biodiversity. This shared exploration creates natural opportunities for intergenerational learning and discussion about the environment, fostering a deeper connection to nature through social interaction.