Paper Boat is an abstract augmented reality (AR) interactive artwork that brings visibility to the climate crisis and growing threat of sea level rise at the MIT campus. Through play, animation, and interaction design, this work invites the MIT community to engage with the urgent realities of global warming and its tangible impacts on the environment. One of the challenges with sea level rise is its gradual, often imperceptible progression, which makes it difficult to visualize or feel its urgency in everyday life. Paper Boat confronts this invisibility by transforming it into a playful, site-specific AR experience.
This location-based artwork playfully brings to the surface rising temperatures, rapidly melting glaciers, and projected storms and sea level rise onto the familiar landscape of MIT, offering a visceral and imaginative encounter with the scientific data. In the experience, the player must guide a human character safely to a paper boat while navigating through floating garbage, plastic waste, and rising waters. The game unfolds in real time, with the water—surrounding the player—steadily increasing. There is a limited time for playing the game since if the player cannot rescue the man in time, both they and the character are submerged, and the game ends.
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