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Alpine Garden Misguide

An educational locative game for the Montreal Botanical Garden, created under the advisement of Dr. Jill Didur, Concordia University, Montreal. Players use a compass to discover "plants" (QR tags) spread throughout the garden. Along the way, they unlock archival material of actual British plant hunters in Nepal, questioning the imperialist impulse of collection. (Today, we might instead use machine learning to collect the "plants themselves.")

I designed and programmed the app in iOS from the ground-up with OpenGL. In addition, I helped present the project at ACLA 2013 and iterated the design over several play-tests at the site.

We successfully demoed the app to the garden administration. Project was officially launched (marketed by the garden) May 2015. Alpine Garden Misguide is the first digital locative experience installed in the MBG in its 83 year lifespan. Read more about the launch here, or view the Misguide website.

This project secured a $390,000 SSHRC Insight Grant for my supervisor, Dr. Didur, for five years. Play-test with Pippin Barr and Rilla Khaled featured in TAG lab’s promotional video: http://tag.hexagram.ca/about/.