Discovery Cube 2022
ECO HEROES – Recycled Water Adventure
Winner of the USA WateReuse Award of 2023.
Teaming up with The Discovery Cube and Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD)), we took a deep dive to help develop the next generation of digital tools to teach about the complicated water recycling process that draws from the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology to treat sewer water so that it can be used again for other purposes.
The Team's approach was to design a unique 360 Virtual Reality- interactive experience that could be enjoyed in ways never before possible by using VR glasses, touchscreen TVs and laptops in the classroom. 360’ video pairs a staff member of IRWD (shot on greenscreen) with a little droid called Clean-Bot, on an immersive adventure of IRWD’s Michelson water recycling plant. Imagine being at the bottom of an extremely dirty swimming pool, teaming with countless pieces of garbage, microscopic organisms, and some very nasty sludge!
360’ video pairs a staff member of IRWD (shot on greenscreen) with a little droid called Clean-Bot, on an immersive adventure of IRWD’s Michelson water recycling plant. Gamified activities let students interact with colorful, feature-rich 360digital environments as they learn about microorganisms, identify non-flushable items, zapping harmful pathogens with UV light etc. The many 8K 360 VR environments, consisting of 3D plant machinery, household objects and microorganism particle systems were built, animated, and rendered using 3DS Max. The complex 360 compositing process involved dozens of layers of tiny creatures, garbage, and billions of microbes.
